Take one ambitious young man, give him an opportunity and what do you create? Read on!
There’s one word in particular that’s synonymous with Cornerstone – and that’s quality.
Quality of the work we produce, and of the people who produce it.
It’s also one of the first words that comes out of the mouth of our Print Room Manager, Sam Casey, when we sit down with him to chronicle his Cornerstone career journey to share with other jobseekers interested in working for us.
This was his reply when we asked Sam what made Cornerstone different to any of the previous places he’s worked: “The quality of work and the people was obvious straight away. The workplace was much tidier, and the jobs were more well organised.
“Everything we do is made from top quality materials and is quality checked when it comes in and before it goes out. It’s the atmosphere too. Everybody is professional, sociable and friendly, and it all comes back to being excellent and giving the customers what they want.”
Quality (sorry, we couldn’t resist!) should be your mantra if you’d like to join Sam and the Cornerstone team.
Seizing a big opportunity to develop a career
Sam joined Cornerstone four years ago, having worked in the signage industry since leaving college, starting out making number plates in his uncle’s graphics business before moving to a signage company in Stockport, where he found himself mainly working on installations but wanting to do more.
As a local lad to our base in Lees, near Oldham in Greater Manchester, it was the location that Sam first spotted when we advertised for a print room and signage operative. On closer inspection, he realised a fantastic opportunity was staring him in the face.
Sam takes up the story: “Yes, the job was only round the corner, but I could see there was a big opportunity to grow in it. Back then, we only had one person in the print room, and the job was a lot more advanced than I was used to.
“The learning curve has been steep. I’ve learnt 100 per cent more here than anywhere else I’ve worked – developing client relationships, learning new printing techniques and systems, quoting for jobs and some Cornerstone business development work, which has been going well. I’ve gone from doing one bit of a job to doing the whole thing.
“You’re part of a bigger team as well. Everybody is friendly and supportive, and you get to understand their jobs and they understand mine, so it makes it a streamlined process seeing a job through from start to finish.”
A proud track record of developing talent
Sam is one of several products of Cornerstone’s proud track record of developing talent and providing opportunities for employees to progress their careers, an ethos embedded by our founder and MD David Wadsworth.
“We’ve built a team of talented specialists by investing heavily in their training and development, helping them to build a career within our organisation that satisfies their ambitions for personal growth and development, whilst helping to deliver ever improving results and client satisfaction,” says David.
“It takes a lot of graft to get the right people and the right personalities with the right ethics. It’s been a huge focus of mine over the years, and it’s been a focus of how I’ve trained our management team to go and recruit people in the same way. Just anyone isn’t who I want, and it’s not the way I’ve wanted to build the business.”
Working at Cornerstone – the word according to Sam!
We asked Sam to share more of his experiences of working at Cornerstone. Here they are:
CS: How have you seen the company evolve?
Sam: “Since I started, it’s grown about 50%. When I started, there were 15 members of staff, and now we have 30. The great thing is that we’ve maintained the same culture even though we’ve grown so much. Everybody is just as friendly, supportive and, obviously, professional. And it’s not just me anymore, I’ve been joined by Steve in the print room – so that means I’ve worked with him for 10 years now after getting to know him at my previous place at Stockport!”
CS: What excites you about the future?
Sam: “The different challenges this job throws up. New clients mean new challenges and a lot of bespoke work. There are some techniques we’ve not used yet, such as a burnt wood, ranch-style effect, that we’re hoping to do soon for a client we’re talking to. There’s a rustic-effect rust signage technique that we’ve been looking at for a client too, so I’m hoping we can give that a go. I’ve seen it out and about and I’m looking forward to doing it. I think some clients will like it when they see it.”
CS: What benefits have you seen/does the company provide?
Sam: “The most obvious benefit is that I’ve been given the chance to develop in my job and grow it into what it is today, Print Room Manager. But I’d also say we’re pretty well paid, we get help with medical expenses, the holidays are decent, especially at Christmas, and there’s an overall caring attitude towards everyone who works here. The flexible working, for example, gives people the best work/life balance.”
CS: What’s the leadership team like and the dynamic across departments?
Sam: “The leadership is good, there’s always someone you can ask for help and advice. If it’s not David, then someone else will help you. That’s helped by the dynamics across the departments, we all know each other well. I’ve grown to understand what they do, and they now understand my job too, so say for example, I’m dealing with the account managers and the designers, it means jobs get done quickly and smoothly.”
CS: How do you find working in a full-service agency, as opposed to in-house or single service?
Sam: “It’s bigger and there’s more people doing different jobs, whereas where I worked before we were just doing signage, although there were designers and account managers but not as many. The good thing about being part of a full-service agency is the number of people you can ask for help and advice; it really improves the workflow and takes away any hassle.”
CS: What are the clients like?
Sam: “We build very good relationships with our clients. By getting to know them well we have good communication and that helps to get the job done to everybody’s satisfaction. That’s another thing about being a full-service agency, a client might come to us for signage but then as the relationship develops they might want different things from us, such as marketing, website work, advertising, PR and such like. Sometimes, we’re the first connection with Cornerstone and that can lead to much more, so you always have to have that in mind.”
CS: What’s the one standout thing you’d say to anyone considering working at Cornerstone?
Sam: “It’s quality again. We work with the best materials, there are no imperfections, and everything is checked, and checked and checked. We get sign off from the client before and after their job goes into production, so everything is absolutely nailed down.”
CS: What’s been your biggest challenge so far?
Sam: “It was a huge sign at Waterside Leisure Club in Cheadle, it’s the biggest installation I’ve ever worked on. We worked closely with our designers on the creative, conducted the site survey, and made sure all the details were of the correct specifications for the install.
“The sign was so big, it had to be lifted off the delivery truck by a crane, so we had to create concrete anchor points, so it was safe and secure to offload it. It was backlit and part timber in construction too, so we had to prepare all the electrical connections. It was mainly installation but it’s the biggest job I’ve worked on.”
CS: What’s your favourite piece of work?
Sam: “That’s the Waterside installation – it was huge.”
CS: What do social events look like at Cornerstone?
Sam: “We work hard but we like a good time as well. The two standouts are the team building and summer barbecue day every year, and the Christmas party. Last year’s Christmas party had a tongue-in-cheek Oscar presentations, buffet, live band and cocktail bar – it was one of the best yet and everything was free. There’s loads of other stuff going on too, like trips in to Manchester, going for a curry night, and quiz and games nights in the office with free food. We like a good laugh.”
CS: If you could only say 10 words about the team, what would they be?
Sam: (Long pause for head scratching!) “Professional, friendly and well balanced, by that I mean everyone has a good work/home life balance. Is that 10 words?”
CS: Let’s try again! If you could only say 10 words about the agency, what would they be?
Sam: “Flexible, professional, friendly, quality, hardworking, we enjoy what we do.”
CS: You nailed it that time, Sam!
If Sam’s story has whetted your appetite for working somewhere very special, get in touch with your CV. If you have the qualities we’re looking for, it might just be the best move you ever make!
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Nigel has been a journalist since the days of typewriters (not even electric typewriters)! He has edited several weekly newspapers across Greater Manchester, been the editor-in-chief of several more and edited a daily newspaper in Northern Ireland. He came home to work on the former Greater Manchester regional TV station Channel M. Having dropped the […]
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From Account Exec to Head of Digital: What I’ve Learnt from Six Years at Cornerstone
When I left university with an English degree and a summer of European travel ahead of me, I had no clue what I wanted from a career. I remember a family friend asking me the question and my response was something along the lines of:
“To help take a small business to the next level, to get its name out there and watch it thrive knowing I had a hand in that.”
Marketing. Marketing was the word I was looking for in that moment.
I then spent a year working two jobs as a remote marketing coordinator for a B2B start-up and PR exec for an education marketing agency, working to achieve my Google Squared qualification, discovering a growing interest for digital, and, honestly, feeling incredibly isolated and disengaged before a recruiter reached out to me with an account exec opportunity at an agency in Oldham.
I joined Cornerstone when there were just eight of us on the team, and when the opportunity to take on more digital responsibilities arose, I jumped at the chance. Delivering full-service campaigns that excelled, coupled with David’s tenacity for growing our client base, it wasn’t long before the digital and wider agency team was expanding.
Growing from a team of 8 to 30+ in the last six years hasn’t been easy and there have definitely been key learnings over the years which I’d like to share here…
Challenges are easy to overcome when your team has your back
You’ll hear me say it time and time again, but our people are genuinely one of the best things about Cornerstone. Creating an environment in which people feel comfortable enough to give honest feedback means that when challenges arise, you have a team that you’re fully confident in and who are just as trusting in you.
We like to say that we get shit done, taking a proactive approach to any and all things that are thrown at us on both a client-side and internally too. We wouldn’t be able to say that with confidence if we didn’t trust in our team and if they didn’t trust in each other.
Making sure we continue to grow our team with honest and reliable people is pivotal in knowing that we can handle whatever the next curveball is.
Management and leadership are very different but equally important
When we formed our Senior Management Team (SMT) in 2020, it was the beginning of a new team structure for Cornerstone adding a layer of managers and leaders between our Managing Director and the rest of the team (though I still think you’d be hard pressed to find an MD that’s as available to the entire team as David is)!
Embarking on this new role, for me, was a steep learning curve, understanding that every team member benefits from different levels of leadership and management. It also allowed me to understand where I could improve as a leader and manager. I always felt I was pretty good at the leadership side (mentoring, leading by example etc.) but the management side was a whole different ball game.
We’ve since invested heavily in training and developing our internal processes to ensure that each department head is fully supported to lead their team to success, and that the success is shared and felt by each individual.
Our client base matters
What’s an agency without its clients?
Obviously, they’re the reason we’re all here, but we want to believe in that reason too.
We make sure that every client we work with aligns with our own ethos and morals, as well as providing exciting and enjoyable accounts for the team to spend their days working alongside.
You’ll often hear the team say no two days are ever the same and they’re right thanks to our client base spanning leisure, pharma, eCommerce, health, public and private sectors.
Culture is what you do, not what you say
‘Culture’ is a word that seems to get wheeled out more and more in every recruitment campaign I see across all industries nowadays. Many businesses seem to have identified it as some sort of buzzword that they think equates to a day off on your birthday or meeting bare minimum salary requirements for the role, when it’s in fact the absolute key to employee wellbeing if actually delivered on.
At Cornerstone it’s constantly at the top of our agenda, ensuring we’re adapting day-to-day agency life and long-term strategies to genuinely create a culture that helps the team thrive. It’s not just the annual bonuses and salaries benchmarked on UK averages. It’s the private healthcare, flexible working, funded social events, in-house gym, team building days out of the office, training budgets, learning lunches, monthly nail and beauty appointments, quarterly car valeting, regular employee surveying, one-to-ones, mentoring, employee rewards, celebrating each other’s wins on a daily basis and approaching a collaborative work environment in an encouraging way.
As part of this blog, David also asked me:
“If you could only say 10 words about the team, what would they be?”
- Hard-working
- Grounded
- Friendly
- Ethical
- Driven
- Fun
- Reliable
- Intelligent
- Supportive
- Trustworthy
“If you could only say 10 words about the agency, what would they be?”
- Hard-working
- Grounded
- Friendly
- Ethical
- Driven
- Fun
- Reliable
- Intelligent
- Supportive
- Trustworthy
Yes, those two lists are exactly the same. Because our team make our agency what it is. Without them, Cornerstone wouldn’t be even a shadow of what it is today.
If this has you in any way interested in working at Cornerstone, make sure you check out our careers page. Even if there’s nothing open in your specialism, you can sign up to be alerted as soon as we’re next recruiting.
Jess joined Cornerstone as an account executive in January 2017 following freelance roles within marketing and PR fields. Exploring her passion for all thing digital, Jess embarked on several training courses and became Cornerstone’s dedicated digital marketer within 12 months of joining the Cornerstone team. Jess gets involved in all digital work at Cornerstone including […]
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24 Crucial Facts About Using Threads That You Need To Know
Threads is a new app developed by Instagram which has been designed to be a text-based social media platform, built for users to share text and join public conversations.
The Threads app, released on 6th July 2023, allows users to post short text-based messages, much like it’s competitor Twitter. Twitter has been a prominent social media platform for over a decade, offering a space for users to express their thoughts and engage in conversations with a global audience through short form text.
Instagram says ‘Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas’.
As Threads begins to find its place in the social media landscape, we’ve explored 25 things you need to know about Threads, things you should consider within your social media strategy, and how to harness the growth opportunities it presents for your.
An introduction to Threads
- What is Threads, and what is the Threads app for?
- How do you set up a Threads account?
- How does Threads work?
- How to post on Threads
How to use Threads
- Threads character length
- Hashtags on Threads
- How to react on Threads
- Using multiple accounts on Threads
- What can posts on Threads include?
- Threads search function
- Who can use Threads?
Instagram & Threads
- Do you need an Instagram account for Threads? Is Threads linked to Instagram?
- What data is used from your Instagram account?
- Importing Instagram followers to Threads
- Deleting your Threads account
Threads content and safety
How popular is Threads?
- Time taken for social channels to reach 1 million users
- Who was the first to reach 1 million followers on Threads?
- Most followed Thread accounts
- Thread language
What to expect from Threads in the future
An introduction to Threads
1. What is Threads, and what is the Threads app for?
Threads, an Instagram-associated new app from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and Meta’s text-based rival for Twitter.
The Threads app is built for sharing short-form text and uses Instagram’s existing safety and user controls. It allows you to connect with friends and those with whom you share interests, get real-time updates and engage in discussions.
2. How do you set up a Threads account?
To set up a Threads account, you’ll need to download the “Threads, an Instagram app” from the App Store or the Google Play Store and install.
You will then need to use your Instagram account to log in. This allows your Instagram username and verification to follow you over to Threads, however you can customise your profile for Threads separately.
Threads will ask you to confirm your username, bio, link and profile information the first time you log in, which you can import from Instagram. You can choose your privacy options, allowing you to choose between a public or private profile.
You’ll then be asked to choose some accounts to follow before you click Join Threads and you are ready to start threading. You can import your following directly from your Instagram account, too.
3. How does Threads work?
Threads is an Instagram app and social media platform where you can post short pieces of text (threads), reply and engage in conversations with others and follow friends, family or profiles you are interested in.
Any thread you post will appear on your profile and in feed. You can choose who can interact with your threads through your privacy settings.
4. How to post on Threads
- To start a new thread, click tap the icon centred at the bottom of your app.
- Draft your thread, if you’d like to include photo or video, click the to attach up to 10 items, and Done (Android) or Add (iPhone) in the top right.
- To add to your thread, tap Add to thread, if you exceed the character limit another thread will be automatically generated.
- You can then choose who can reply before you post by tapping Anyone can reply in the bottom left.
- Then tap Post to publish your thread.
How to use threads
The Threads app is easy to use, and here’s what you need to know when getting started.
5. Threads character length
Thread posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos and videos (up to 5 minutes in length) and can be easily shared or reposted to your Instagram story.
6. Hashtags on threads
Hashtags are used to help make search easier on many social media platforms by placing a hashtag symbol(#) before keywords or phrases. They are used on many social platforms including Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and popularised on Twitter.
When used in the Threads app appear in the feed as normal text and they are not interactive in the same way as on other social media channels.
At present Threads do not use hashtags, nor is there a function to search specific content or posts by hashtag. However, there is speculation that Threads will have hashtags in the future, as Instagram announced they will soon add a number of new features to help with discovery and search on the platform, making it easier to follow trends.
Post by @threadsappView on Threads
7. How to react on Threads
There are a number of ways you can react on threads, which include:
- Liking – clicking the heart icon to like a post or comment on a thread
- Commenting – you can comment on threads, known as a reply and choose who can respond to you when in your draft and after you post.
- Reposting – you can repost or quote a thread.
- Sharing – you can share by adding to your Instagram story or posting to your Threads feed.
8. Using multiple accounts on Threads
Threads does give you the option to have multiple accounts, however to navigate between multiple accounts users are required to log out and initiate a switch from the main login screen.
For people who have multiple accounts, such as social media marketers, the switch between multiple accounts is not as seamless as it is on Instagram. The switch will require a few taps to log in and out of different accounts, here’s how you do it:
- First make sure you have Threads account created for each of your accounts.
- Navigate to your profile page and click on the hamburger menu located at the top-right corner to access the settings.
- Within the settings, scroll down to the bottom of the page.
- Look for the option to log out and select it.
- A prompt will appear, asking you to confirm the logout from your current profile.
- After confirming, you will be redirected to the home page.
- Below the home page, you will find the option to log in with your primary profile.
- If you have multiple profiles added, click on the option to switch profiles and choose the desired profile for logging in.
9. What can posts on Threads include? –
On the Threads app you can include text and links alongside up to 10 photos or videos up to 5 minutes in length.
10. Threads search function
Since its launch, the Threads app has only allowed users to search for Threads accounts by username, unlike search functions we see on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook which allow you to search key words and phrases, helping you to find relevant information and trending topics.
However, Instagram shared details of future developments for Threads, which included new features to help you find threads and creators you’re interested in and improvements to the search function that will make it easier to follow topics and trends as part of their Threads launch announcement.
11. Who can use Threads?
Threads was rolled out on Thursday 6th July 2023 to 100 countries, available only as an app on iOS and Android. Threads is not yet available in the European Union (EU), it’s release was postponed in the EU amid regulatory concerns about how the app will use personal data and safeguard user privacy, infringing on the Digital Markets Act, which regulates the sharing of user data across multiple platforms.
The app is also not available in Iran and is blocked in China.
Post by @threadsappView on Threads
Users need to be at 12+ to create a Threads account. Meta have shared that anyone who sets up an account and are under 16 (or under 18 in some countries) will have their accounts defaulted to a private profile when they join Threads.
Instagram & Threads
12. Do you need an Instagram account for Threads? Is Threads linked to Instagram?
To create a Thread account, currently you do need to have a linked Instagram account. If you want to access Threads, you will have to sign up for Instagram first.
13. What data is used from your Instagram account?
Meta uses some of the data from your Instagram account to power your profile on the Threads App. When you create a profile on Threads, it becomes connected to the Instagram account you logged in with. This enables Meta to import your profile information, personalise your feed, and ensure your safety on both apps. Threads may also use Instagram data to personalise and enhance your experience on Instagram while promoting the safety and integrity of their services.
Data from your Instagram account which is used for Threads can include:
- Your Instagram login information
- Your Instagram account ID
- Your Instagram name and username
- Your Instagram profile information such as your profile picture, bio and links
- Your Instagram followers
- Accounts you follow on Instagram
- Your age on Instagram
14. Importing Instagram followers to Threads
Currently the Threads app does not allow you to import your Instagram followers to Threads. It does however offer your followers the option to follow you when they join Threads, offering them the option to follow all or manually select the ones you want to follow.
15. Deleting your Threads account
You can delete your Threads account, however you can’t delete your Threads account without also deleting your Instagram account currently. The Threads app does provide an option to deactivate your Threads account which will allow you to keep your Instagram and reactivate your Threads account whenever you log back into the app in future.
To deactivate your account by accessing your profile and clicking the two lines in the top-right corner, then clicking Account and then clicking Deactivate profile, the Thread app will then ask you to confirm you want to deactivate your profile, which will temporarily hide your Threads account and your content until you decide to reactivate it.
The link between your Instagram and Threads account currently means if you delete your Threads account you will also be deleting your Instagram account. Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri has provided an update and said that Meta is “looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately.”
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
You can deactivate your Threads account, which will hide your profile and content from other users. You can reverse this by reactivating your Threads account at any time by logging back in.
Threads content and safety
16. Safety features
The Threads app uses Instagram’s existing suite of safety and user controls, enforcing Instagram’s Community Guidelines on content and interactions in the app.
Threads, allows you to use safety features like blocking, reporting and hiding. Additional privacy settings have been created to help users stay safe on the app, this includes:
- Profile settings such as “Public profile” to allow anyone to interact with you, or “Private profile” to only allow interaction from people that follow you.
- Minors will have their accounts defaulted into a private profile when they join Threads.
- Hidden words which is a feature that allows you to hide replies or messages for specific words on Threads and Instagram, or you can add custom words to the list if you’re getting harassed.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
17. What we know about the Threads algorithm (so far)
Meta haven’t shared too much about the Threads algorithm and how it decides which content we see just yet. What we do know has been shared by Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri that the algorithm does not heavily rely on ranking posts but recommends posts from random accounts, the ones you do not follow. He notes that it is important for a new app, as users need to follow enough people to get the algorithm working.
Post by @threadsappView on Threads
Currently on the Threads app, you can see content from accounts that you follow, as well as accounts you don’t. Threads also does not currently feature a chronological feed option like Facebook and Instagram, however, Mosseri shared that it is a feature that they will be bringing to Threads.
How popular is Threads?
Within the first few days of Threads being launched it’s safe to say that Threads has been a hit with over 30+ million users in the first day alone.
Post by @zuckView on Threads
The timeline of signups is as follows:
- 1 million users in 30 minutes
- 2 million users in the first 2 hours
- 5 million users in the first 4 hours
- 10 million sign ups in 7 hours
- 30 million sign ups after 24 hours
In fact, Threads has been so popular that it has been one of the quickest social media platforms to reach 1 million users:
18. Time taken to reach 1 million users:
- Netflix – 3.5 years
- Twitter – 2 years
- Facebook 10 months
- Spotify – 5 months
- Instagram – 2.5 months
- ChatGPT – 5 days
- Threads – 30 minutes
Post by @zuckView on Threads
19. Who was the first to reach 1 million followers on Threads?
According to business insider, as of Thursday morning, the official Instagram account (@instagram) was the first account on Threads to reach 1M followers.
The first person to reach 1 million followers was Mr Beast (@mrbeast), reaching 1 million followers hours after launch, according to The Guinness World Records. Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck) reached 1 million followers 20 minutes later at 15:02PM.
20. Most followed Threads accounts
As of the second day after launch the top 10 most followed Threads accounts are:
| Rank | Username | Owner | Followers | Activity | Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4.6M | Social media platform | United States | ||
| 2 | @natgeo | National Geographic | 2.8M | Magazine | United States |
| 3 | @kimkardashian | Kim Kardashian | 2.7M | Television personality, model, and businesswoman | United States |
| 4 | @mrbeast | MrBeast | 2.7M | YouTube personality | United States |
| 5 | @shakira | Shakira | 2.2M | Musician | Colombia |
| 6 | @chrishemsworth | Chris Hemsworth | 2.1M | Actor | Australia |
| 7 | @willsmith | Will Smith | 2.1M | Actor | United States |
| 8 | @kyliejenner | Kylie Jenner | 2M | Television personality and businesswoman | United States |
| 9 | @9gag | 9GAG | 2M | Social media website | United States |
| 10 | @jlo | Jennifer Lopez | 2M | Musician and actress | United States |
What to expect from Threads in the future
Threads has had an explosive launch and a positive reception overall from it’s new users of the app. But what’s to come from the future of the app? Creators from the Thread app have hinted, along with speculations from users, of what’s to come in the future:
22. Compatibility of Threads with other apps
Threads are working towards compatibility with ActivityPub protocol established by W3C, which would make Threads interoperable with other apps that support the protocol, such as WordPress which are currently not possible on most social apps.
In their announcement, they shared that their vision is “that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks.”
23. Threads chronological timeline
Threads does not currently feature a chronological feed option, and shows content from people you follow and people you don’t alongside one another. However, head of Instagram, and one of the minds behind the creation of Threads – Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) shared that the chronological feed is something that they will be bringing to the app in the future.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
24. Threads ALT text
The Threads app currently does not allow for alternative text (alt text) as an option for images or video on the app, which is crucial for accessibility. While screen readers are supported and AI-generated descriptions of images are enabled on the app, it doesn’t allow users to add alt text to their own images, as AI descriptions aren’t always accurate.
We do expect that this is an update which will be coming soon.
How to capitalise on the opportunity Threads presents for your business?
Capitalising on the growth opportunities presented by Threads, can be a useful strategy for businesses looking to enhance their brand visibility and engage with a wider audience.
While there is no guarantee that Threads will be a long-term success, it has seen exponential growth since its launch and continued investment in its development from Meta, Threads may prove to be a great opportunity for brands looking to grow their presence on social media.
Over the coming months, we’re likely to see a search function or the ability to see trends in Threads, which will give brands that have invested in their Threads social media strategy the opportunity to expand their reach.
Ask us how we can help you optimise your social strategy.
Let’s chat!
We’ve compiled our ultimate guide to understanding the latest social media platform on the scene; Threads from Meta.
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Social Media Marketing Updates For July 2023
From a ground-breaking AI bot to Meta making every social media marketer’s dream come true, here are the latest social media algorithm, tool, and feature updates for July 2023.
Instagram now allows up to 5 links in bio
Social media marketers asked, Meta finally listened!
Instagram users are now able to add up to 5 links to their Instagram bio.
Meta says that the motivation behind this change is to allow users to: “highlight what (they’re) passionate about, bring awareness to causes and more”.1
But does this mean the end for LinkTree and other linking tools? We don’t think so…
Although 5 links may be enough for some organisations, businesses who have a lot to offer and want to direct traffic to more than 5 webpages at a time are best sticking to linking tools for the time being.
Will we see an unlimited links in bio option from Instagram? Probably not. Will all social media marketers hope and pray for this? Most definitely.
LinkedIn testing suggested posts feature
LinkedIn Business have revealed they are testing a new Suggested Posts feature in grids after seeing a 2x increase in people engaging in posts sharing knowledge, ideas, and support2– which is something to note for your business’ future social media marketing strategies!
This will be an important new feature to consider when forming follower growth strategies, as it gives you extra opportunity to reach new audiences with engaging content.
The feature will look at what’s trending amongst professionals in your field and show users tailored conversations and content that will be relevant to them.
LinkedIn users are continuously looking for educations content on the platform that they can sink their teeth into and share their opinions on, and your business needs to satisfy this intent through informative content blogs (like this one), LinkedIn newsletters, infographics and more.
See how we can level up your LinkedIn strategy today by getting in touch!
Youtube stories are being removed
It’s time to say goodbye to YouTube Stories. It’s official: YouTube Stories will be removed on 26th June 2023, with live stories being permanently deleted 7 days after they were initially shared.
This move from YouTube is in a bid to compete with TikTok and Instagram Reels, which are continuously rising in popularity, by prioritising short-form content through YouTube Shorts – short-form videos that are up to 60 seconds long and appear in a Story format similar to Instagram, and Community Posts – a feature that allows you to connect with your audiences outside of video uploads, including polls, quizzes, GIFs, text, images and more.
If you want to be seen on YouTube, start utilising YouTube Shorts and Community Posts – if YouTube are prioritising these features, it’s likely that their algorithm is too and will BOOST your content!
Instagram’s image size update
You may have noticed that your Instagram feed looks a little different lately, and that’s due to Instagram changing the default size of all images and videos to a portrait size of 1080 x 1350.
What’s the difference? Instagram Feeds now look more visual and focus the user’s attention more to a singular post, increasing interactivity and engagement in the process. However, we need to be aware that the new cropping parameters may change how images appear in the Grid feed.
Snapchat AI BOT
Snapchat have recently launched an AI Bot that is powered by Chat GPT which has already ‘snapped’ up a lot of conversations – and not a lot of them positive.
Unlike Chat GPT, Snapchat’s conversational AI Bot does not aim to act as a search engine, rather its appeal is that you can talk to the AI every day alongside your friends to generate new discussion ideas, funny jokes, and more.
As our PR & Copywriter Nigel discussed in his latest blog on the power of ChatGPT, Chat GPT is great for conducting research and inspiring content ideas, but this new development sees its functionality being used for personal conversations with users through a Snapchat Bot. Users have reported it pulling their personal information such as IP addresses without explicit consent which would bring into question its privacy and GDPR compliance.
With Snapchat hosting a younger audience, parents have also raised concerns around the new AI feature which can be customised with a name and design a bespoke Bitmoji3 – the lines between AI and reality blurring more by the day!
This issue is likely something Snapchat could easily resolve, but with more digital users expecting privacy and control over their data, it’s heavily decreased the bot’s chances for success before it’s fully launched into digital orbit.
Cornerstone Chat Bot
One thing’s for certain – you can definitely trust the Cornerstone ChatBot!
Our Cornerstone ChatBot doesn’t use AI which gives you complete control to craft personal, relevant responses to user’s queries that align with brand tone. All of our chatbot responses are written by a human behind the computer screen and no personal data being collected unless it’s been provided by the user for a specific purpose through a GDPR compliant contact form.
Find out more about how our ChatBot services can improve your customer service and reduce call times by getting in touch with us today.
1 Meta Newsroom
2 Building LinkedIn
3 Snapchat’s New AI Bot is Already Raising Alarms Amongst Teens and Parents
Meet Digital Marketing Executive Madeline, Cornerstone’s FIRST-ever Degree Apprentice! Madeline (she insisted we use her Sunday name, the rest of the time she’s Maddy!) is making a well-considered choice to earn AND learn, as she’s currently working towards a Level 6 Digital Marketing Degree Qualification after achieving a Distinction in her Level 3 Digital Marketing […]
Find out more about usThe importance of storytelling within the leisure industry
What next for the public sector leisure industry? The story waiting to be told…
Here’s a true story, courtesy of Salford Community Leisure.
An 81-year-old lady attending a 24-week postural stability course at Wardley Community Centre was initially reliant on her walking stick.
On week one she managed six sit-to-stand exercises thanks to some real determination. This increased to 13 in week 12, and 15 by week 24.
Rightly proud and pleased with her achievement, she said to her instructor: “You haven’t noticed that I haven’t brought my stick for the last few weeks.” To which the instructor assured her they had noticed – and it had been a lot longer than just a few weeks! “Has it!?” she replied.
Why are we sharing that anecdote you might ask? Two reasons – and both are extremely and equally important for the future of public sector leisure.
The first is that the lady in question was feeling the benefit of exercise brought about by social prescribing – when health professionals refer patients to support in the community, in order to improve their health and wellbeing.
Secondly, by sharing her story, we are highlighting the benefits of social prescribing, thus bringing to life the excellent work and accomplishments being achieved not just in Salford, but in public sector leisure and community centres up and down the country.
If you didn’t know of the great work that goes on to benefit all ages, abilities, disabilities, health conditions and fitness levels day in, day out, you now have an inkling. That’s the power of storytelling, so imagine the level of awareness that could be achieved if more anecdotes and examples of excellent, life-enhancing work were shared by the operators of the 2,727* publicly owned leisure centres in the UK. (*Local Government Association)
Public sector leisure – the real story is in the telling
It’s no secret the leisure industry – public and private – is experiencing tough times due to the cost-of-living crisis and spiralling energy bills. At the moment, you are more likely to see and read about the financial implications for public swimming pools than you are about the water-based, Good Boost muscular skeletal programmes supporting those living with muscle and joint pain.
The lack of storytelling in the public sector leisure industry is actually undermining its unique selling point (USP) – that no one else is capable of providing the scope of wellness facilities and services currently being offered in our leisure centres and swimming pools.
So much so, that a leading figure in the leisure industry, Graeme Hinde, re-ignited the debate at the latest gathering of the LFX leisure industry networking group he founded, where more than 60 industry leaders were focused on the hugely relevant topic of ‘what next for leisure?’
Numerous topics and issues were covered but what came out loud and clear was that the sector has been, and still is, poor at telling the powerful stories that result from its work.
Telling those stories about how health and wellbeing is incorporated into day-to-day leisure and community centre activities can make a huge difference to the way public sector leisure is perceived. It prompted those LFX members present to make one simple pledge: to tell more success stories.
Taking the leisure storytelling debate public
Following the LFX event, Graeme took to the LinkedIn social media platform to share the debate, prompting more insightful observations, especially about the industry’s readiness to share success as a team triumph rather than it being seen as a ‘look at us, aren’t we great’ moment.
One reply, from Malcolm McPhail, CEO of KA Leisure, says: “(Graeme) I know the importance of this message and I hear you! However, are we as an industry ready to embrace these stories and use them as a Team Trust approach, demonstrating the ability to bask in other peoples’ glory, replicate them or indeed better them? My experience is that we are not that cohesive, or mature enough, to explore joined up success.”
Peter Kilkenny, Executive Director at PG Reviews management consultancy, agreed: “Malcolm is correct, that maturity is often lacking and when those in the public sector make a case it is often lost with discussions about costs / alternate delivery models.
“It makes complete sense to better understand the complex world of the new (NHS) integrated care organisations (as) these will be pivotal and strong advocates when real sustainable change is required. Not sure if the sector generally really understands these health-related organisations.”
John Oxley, currently Interim CEO at Life Leisure in Stockport, adds: “I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of sharing our stories – past and present. I’m certain that there are lots of people we need to influence who are not aware of the amazing things that are done and have been done. In fact, we probably should say less to each other and more to those that would love to know the impact we have and how we do it but aren’t aware. I also think that our stories should be about our future as well as our past and present – just a thought.”
What’s next for leisure? The Pivot to Active Wellbeing
It’s not about fitness, it’s all about health and movement. That was the message to GM Active, which represents the 12 public sector leisure operators in Greater Manchester, from industry data expert and commentator David Minton when he joined one of its board meetings. He praised the collective’s objective to pivot from fitness providers to the vanguard of public health, saying it was ‘light years’ ahead of anyone else he was aware of.
Citing the term, a dose of activity, a phrase coined by a Harvard professor, David said the public sector’s next big challenge was to understand the needs of the individual – and in doing so the industry would grow ‘like crazy’.
Ask anyone from GM Active what’s next for public sector leisure and you will get one answer – the Pivot to Active Wellbeing.
This is a far-reaching change programme to create sustainable public leisure services working collaboratively within Greater Manchester to support improvements in the health of the wider population through active wellbeing.
The aim is to change how local leisure centres, swimming pools, fitness facilities and services are perceived and used, putting a greater emphasis on health and wellbeing instead of being purely focused on fitness. The future is wellness – physical and mental – and activity helps both.
Getting people through the doors of our leisure/community centres and swimming pools to be more active, potentially takes a burden off the NHS, especially if social prescribing and exercise referral schemes help patients prepare for treatment, recover from it more quickly and maintain healthier ways of living afterwards.
The Pivot to Active Wellbeing programme is something GM Active and its collaborators that include GreaterSport, the 10 Greater Manchester local authorities, Sport England, other partners such as GM Moving, and the 12 Greater Manchester leisure trusts, hope will create a blueprint for a nationwide shift of emphasis in public sector leisure.
It’s another story to be told and we’ve started by sharing information in a series of social posts on behalf of GM Active. Here’s a taster…
“What is the pivot to active wellbeing? For us at GM Active it means shifting the emphasis of our operations away from leisure and fitness towards a more health-focused approach.
Work began in earnest at the start of the year and essentially, our pivot has four areas of focus:
- Assessing our facilities and services and repurposing them if necessary.
- Academic rigour – our active academic partnership with University of Salford ensures everything we do is researched and tested.
- Workforce development – Transformational Leaders Programme is leading the way on this.
- Federal approach to the way we operate with collective and local ways of working.
As a collective of 12 health and wellness operators, responsible for 99 leisure and sports facilities across Greater Manchester, we are determined to transform our buildings, people and provision to bring a holistic benefit to the communities we serve.
We’ll be sharing more details throughout the weeks and months to come.”
How do you spot a story?
In the course of researching this article, I spoke to a former employee of a Greater Manchester leisure trust who has seen first-hand the stories that very rarely get told.
In his own experience, he admitted, it was because the notion of the great things being achieved where he worked did not enter his consciousness as ‘stories’, and yet he said: “There are great things happening in every leisure centre every day all over the country.”
So, how can you tell a story if you don’t know it’s a story? There isn’t a straightforward answer, although the simplest is to harness the knowledge and expertise of a PR expert. For example, the PR team here at Cornerstone is made up of former senior journalists with vast experience of every kind of media, from print to broadcast to digital and all points in between. When you’ve handled information for decades like they have, it’s instinctive to spot a story when you see it.
If you’re working in public sector leisure and don’t have access to a communications team, or someone with similar expertise in publicity such as a marketer, ask yourself if the work being done at your centre is changing lives for the better. An 81-year-old ditching her walking stick might not always make the pages of the local paper, or secure a radio interview, but it could fuel your social media output, form the basis of a poster, or a video on an information screen. People love to know about other people.
And share it for the right reason. Not the ‘look at how great we are’ reason, but the ‘look at what this can achieve’ reason. That might inspire someone else. If 2,700-plus leisure centres were doing this for all the right reasons, the future of leisure would look much healthier, and so would the future for the people benefiting from it.
What can Cornerstone do for you?
If you are interested in harnessing the experience, expertise, professionalism and creativity of Cornerstone’s PR team to benefit your business or organisation, get in touch.
Nigel has been a journalist since the days of typewriters (not even electric typewriters)! He has edited several weekly newspapers across Greater Manchester, been the editor-in-chief of several more and edited a daily newspaper in Northern Ireland. He came home to work on the former Greater Manchester regional TV station Channel M. Having dropped the […]
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Everything you need to know about Google Analytics 4
In 2020, Google Analytics announced its biggest change since it launched Universal Analytics in 2012: the introduction of Google Analytics 4 (GA4). In 2023, Universal Analytics officially stopped collecting data and GA4 took the wheel.
GA4 holds a lot of trepidation for marketers, but after working with the platform for the last couple of years, our Cornerstone Analytics experts are here to de-mystify the platform and empower you to make the most of GA4…
What do we use GA for?
At its most basic level, Google Analytics gives you free tools to understand your customers’ online journey in order to make informed decisions to improve your ROI.
The data Google Analytics gives us allows us to understand how customers are finding us online, how they’re engaging with your brand online, what they’re most engaged with, what they’re least engaged with and who they are.
From the collected data, we can report on and optimise our digital presence, measuring conversion rates, traffic patterns, and identify opportunities to generate new ideas.
A custom Cornerstone client GA4 report
Why has Google introduced GA4?
As we move into a world free of cookies, GA4 has been introduced with privacy at the forefront. Because GA4 operates across all digital platforms, web and app, it doesn’t rely exclusively on cookies. It uses event-based data modelling for its measurement.
Under GDPR, websites require users to consent to cookies to track website performance but GA4 will start reducing this reliance on cookies to record certain events across web and app by using machine learning to ‘fill in the gaps’ where user consent is not given for tracking, making it more stable to industry changes and preventing future gaps in your data.
GA4 is built with the future in mind, so scalability and growth have been factored into the new design, along with a wider focus on tracking the complete user journey, as opposed to splitting user interaction into sessions, devices or platforms like Universal Analytics.
UA vs GA4: The Key Differences
The most anticipated change from Universal Analytics (UA, or GA3) is the tracking potential on apps, and housing this in the same property as your web data.
GA4 leverages the same measurement model as Google Analytics Firebase (which the majority of app marketers use for tracking at the moment) where all interactions are captured as events. This new unified data schema between a website and a mobile app means that it will be much easier to combine data across them.
Another significant difference between UA and GA4 is how interactions are captured. In UA, interactions were captured in many different hit types such as page views, transactions, and social interactions. In GA4, every interaction is captured as an event.
In UA, a session is typically defined as having ended once there has been a 30-minute period of inactivity or another qualifying reset event has occurred. By contrast in GA4, the session_start event generates a session ID with which all subsequent events during the session are associated. The duration of a session is based on the time span between the first and last event in the session. In short, GA4 gives a more robust view of a user’s session.
There are some key metrics that have depreciated in the move to GA4 too… Bounce rate and average session duration are no more. Google has chosen to take a more “positive” approach by reporting in relation to ‘engagement’; engaged sessions, engagement rate and engagement time. The focus is now more on events and analysing how users are actively engaging with the site or app.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is also now more important than ever. Tag Manager acts as a conduit between your website and Analytics account, giving the power to the marketer to setup custom events for tracking at an incredibly granular level.
In UA, you were able to setup events and conversions without GTM, for instance, creating conversion based on destination pages. This functionality is not available in GA4. All goals are event-based, thanks to the event-based modelling, so it is more important than ever to know your way around GTM to get your custom events setup in a way that works for you.
A few further differences can be seen below:
| Universal Analytics (UA) | Google Analytics 4 (GA4) |
| User-specific way of measuring data – who user is and where they’ve come from | Focuses on what the user does rather than who the user is |
| Logs IP addresses | Entirely anonymous |
| Uses a sessions and pageview-based model | Events-based model – specific actions over who is performing them |
Our GA-4 top tips
1. Setup Google Signals
UA came pre-loaded with a whole plethora of demographics and interest data but, obviously, with privacy front-of-mind, GA4 does not unless…
You activate Google Signals!
Signals is a Google product that launched in 2018 but it’s now more important than ever.
Signals feeds data from users who have turned on Google’s Ads Personalization feature directly into your GA4 property. This association of data with these signed-in users is used to enable cross-device reporting, cross-device remarketing, and cross-device conversion monitoring.1
It’s more robust than traditional BigQuery due to its ability to measure users across devices which gives your funnel analysis the edge as you can optimise user journeys at every stage. You can also focus on areas of the journey that are most valuable to the user by understanding behaviours based on the device combinations that they’re using.
While Google Signals gives us great insight, it does also have its limitations including:
- Inability to integrate in custom reports and dashboards in GA4
- Segmentation features are currently lacking in cross-device reports
- Data is not exported to BigQuery
- Inability to integrate in Data Studio reports
However, the cross-device insights Signals give us is incredibly valuable when applied to CRO strategies, remarketing campaigns, audience analysis and budget optimisation. By understanding users who are signed into Google accounts across devices, GA4 and Signals can give you more accurate demographic information and user characteristics. This data can help you refine target audiences and marketing comms to specific user segments, resulting in more effective campaigns and improved ROI.
2. Generate custom reports and dashboards
Setting up custom reports and dashboards in GA4 allows you to tailor your Analytics data to your specific needs and gain deeper insights into your website or app performance. Custom reports and dashboards offer a range of benefits, from visualising key metrics at a glance to analysing complex data sets in a more user-friendly format.
By selecting and organising relevant data points, you can create customised views in reports that match with your wider goals and objectives and focus on the metrics and dimensions that matter most to you. This then allows for more efficient analysis and reporting, as you can quickly access the most pertinent information and identify trends or patterns within reports you’ve created.
This all help with tracking and monitoring KPIs effectively. By consolidating relevant metrics into a single dashboard, you can track KPIs in real-time, making it easier to track progress, identify areas of improvement, and make data-driven decisions. The ability to customise the layout and timeframes of these reports and dashboards ensures that you have the flexibility to focus on the specific metrics that matter.
By sharing custom reports and dashboards with your wider team, agency or client-side, you can ensure that everyone has access to the same data and insights. This promotes transparency, aligns teams around common goals, and fosters a data-driven culture where decision-making is based on shared insights. Custom reports and dashboards also allow for the automation of reporting processes, saving time and effort while providing up-to-date information to all stakeholders.
3. Get comfortable with secondary dimensions
Using secondary dimensions in GA4 allows you to dig deeper into data and gain valuable insights by adding an additional layer of analysis to primary dimensions. Much like their function within UA, secondary dimensions provide context and granularity to metrics, allowing you to understand the relationship between different variables and uncover meaningful patterns and trends.
For example, by selecting a primary dimension, such as “Source/Medium” to see the sources referring traffic to site, and then adding a secondary dimension, such as “Device Category,” you can see how different traffic sources perform across various device types. This level of segmentation provides insights into user behaviour and helps identify which sources and devices drive the most valuable traffic, allowing for more targeted marketing strategies and optimisation efforts.
As in UA, secondary dimensions can help with data exploration and troubleshooting too. By applying secondary dimensions to primary dimensions, you’re able to drill down into specific data subsets and identify potential issues or opportunities. This analysis helps uncover areas for improvement, such as optimising content or improving user experience, ultimately leading to increased engagement and conversions.
4. Start thinking in terms of engagement
As we’ve explored earlier in this piece, GA4 has taken a very engagement-driven approach, so it’s time we started aligning our thinking with that!
Thinking in terms of engagement helps us to understand how involved and satisfied users are with the website or app. By analysing metrics such as engaged time on site, engagement rates, and event completion, you can identify areas for improvement and implement strategies to enhance user engagement, leading to increased conversions and user satisfaction.
Using this thought in conjunction with the data generated from Signals, you can start to segment your audience by engagement levels. Try to identify highly engaged user segments and create personalised on-site or in-app experiences, such as product recommendations or targeted campaign messaging, to further enhance their engagement and loyalty. By understanding the engagement patterns of different user segments, you can optimise multi-channel marketing campaigns, content strategies, and user flows to better resonate with your target audience.
1 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9445345?hl=en#zippy=%2Cin-this-article
If you’d like to discuss levelling up your GA4 Property with one of our Analytics experts, get in touch! We can help with anything from migrating you over from a basic GA4 setup to a robust GTM container, to setting up Google Signals and developing CRO strategies that boost your bottom line.
Jess joined Cornerstone as an account executive in January 2017 following freelance roles within marketing and PR fields. Exploring her passion for all thing digital, Jess embarked on several training courses and became Cornerstone’s dedicated digital marketer within 12 months of joining the Cornerstone team. Jess gets involved in all digital work at Cornerstone including […]
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No room for guess work in marketing
Your seven steps to marketing heaven
Let’s imagine we have two drivers of identical cars embarking on a journey from Manchester to Glasgow. One plots a route, the other ‘plays it by ear’. It’s probably safe to say, the driver with a plan is more likely to enjoy the smoother journey and arrive before their fellow traveller.
So, if you are taking your business on a marketing journey, you need your roadmap to be thoroughly researched and plotted. There’s no room for guesswork when it comes to a marketing strategy – especially in today’s economic climate.
As a full-service marketing agency, we asked our team of experts to come up with the perfect marketing strategy. Here’s their seven steps to marketing strategy heaven.
1. Research
Conducting research should be the first step to any marketing strategy. It allows you to make more informed decisions – from market trends and competitors to customer insights and needs.
The marketing mix – known as the 4Ps of marketing – is the place to start to understand what you are marketing and where. These are the 4Ps:
- Product – this is the item or service you offer to satisfy your customers’ needs and wants. It’s important to identify what differentiates your product from those of your competitor(s). It’s also important to determine if other products or services can be marketed in conjunction with it.
- Price – what consumers are willing to pay for your product. We need to consider costs related to research and development, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution – also known as cost-based pricing. Pricing based primarily on consumers’ perceived quality or value is known as value-based pricing, and quite often explains why consumers are prepared to buy a more premium-priced product than a cheaper alternative.
- Place – where you sell your product. Is your product best being widely available, or would it be better to be sold in selected stores to maintain the premium perception?
- Promotion – the activities that will sell your product. This might include advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and public relations. It is important that we consider budget available to pay for the marketing mix as that will determine the places to promote your product and how often.
By collating that lot, a fully-fledged marketing plan will start to take shape.
2. Guesswork
We knew that would get your attention! There is absolutely NO place for guesswork in a successful marketing strategy.
If we weren’t being mischievous, objectives would have been the heading for this section. Setting marketing objectives, also known as your marketing goals, in line with your 4Ps is the best place to build from.
Every objective/goal should be as specific as possible. This is the time to get SMART:
Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
Achievable (agreed, attainable).
Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
Timely (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, time-bound, time-sensitive).
Your goals will inform other components of the strategy, including the budget and content creation process – and don’t forget you can always come back and revise your goals as your priorities change.
3. Spend and return on investment
Let’s just dwell on budget a little longer. Namely, does your budget match your objectives/goals?
For example, without the funds, you can’t advertise on the right channels and create the right content to have the powerful impact you’re looking for. Getting a high ROI isn’t cheap.
But don’t forget, a strategy can start small with a hyper focus on one or two goals and build in more as the ROI is generated.
And because not all marketing is focused on products, customer-service businesses rely on other marketing tools that include three additional Ps:
- People, your people, who interact with customers.
- Processes that creates a seamless customer experience.
- Physical evidence, or the area where customers and company representatives interact.
All of these tools are used to promote a product or service and build brand awareness and customer loyalty in order to generate revenue for a business.
4. Knowing your competition
Keep your enemies close is a cliché that springs to mind here. The more you know about yourself and your competitors the better able you will be to serve your customers.
After all, how can you differentiate you and your product(s) from the competition if you have not identified them and analysed their offer?
You might say you already know the competition, but there’s no harm in taking stock as part of an informed marketing strategy. By doing so, you might uncover a surprise product or service capturing the attention and engagement of a customer group that you consider yours.
5. Knowing your customers
Identifying the personas of those accessing your product or service in another important factor that takes the guesswork out of your marketing strategy.
What do we mean by personas? Here’s how personas are born:
- Demographics – the age, gender, education, location and profession of your customers.
- Psychographics – the study of consumers based on psychological characteristics and traits such as values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices. Psychographics in marketing focus on understanding consumers’ emotions and values, so we can market more accurately. The main types of psychographics are interests, activities, and opinions. It’s why your buyer buys.
- Lifestyle – non-work factors such as hobbies and pastimes such as going to the cinema or eating out for example.
- Behaviour – brand loyalty, channel preferences and traits such as shopping habits.
6. Content
A lot of work has gone into this stage of the process, so it’s critical we create content that resonates with your customers.
Quality content is creative, relevant, valuable and engaging to boost brand awareness, sales, conversions or loyalty.
The competition is fierce across all formats. According to HubSpot Research, ‘half of marketers are using videos, with 47% leveraging images, followed by 33% posting blogs, articles, infographics (30%) and podcasts or other audio content (28%).’ Of these, video has the highest ROI.
Let’s recap how we got here. Your content is based on:
- Your goals/business objectives
- Understanding your audience
- Setting an affordable budget
7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
We’ve saved the best until last. Every marketing strategy must include metrics and KPIs so we can understand how well your strategy is working.
Metrics and KPIs relate back to your objectives/goals. They are based on:
- Determining what your KPIs are going to be in the first place – so you can evaluate performance and progress.
- Choosing your content channels.
- Deciding on the type(s) of content to create.
- Creating and distributing your content.
- Analysing and measuring the results against a set number of actionable benchmarks.
Delivering for all of Be Well’s marketing needs
As a full-service agency, we have all the tools – expertise and creativity within design, digital, marketing, PR and content creation – to deliver everything a marketing strategy needs.
In this example, we were tasked with creating a marketing strategy that would seamlessly deliver for all of the needs of Wigan-based leisure trust Be Well, the local council’s new holistic approach to health and wellbeing.
Our strategy included:
- Development of campaign themes and concepts.
- Internal and external communications.
- Increased social media presence, including web banners, email headers, app banners, social covers, a social calendar and PPC assets.
- PPC campaigns.
- Email marketing campaigns for membership retention, referrals and acquisitions.
- Printed assets including flyers, posters, outdoor banners, pull up banners and exhibition banners.
- Press activity including print and online advertising.
What has our work achieved?
The following statistics from our digital team reveal the impact our work has achieved for Be Well. Between June and November 2022, Be Well’s Facebook reach increased by 134%, with even more impressive figures for Instagram, which saw reach increase by almost 600%, impressions increase by 589%, and profile visits increase by 66%.
Website clicks have increased by 1,000% and the number of followers have increased by 24%. Twitter retweets (the sharing of Twitter content) increased by 77% and the number of followers increased by 19%.
Nigel has been a journalist since the days of typewriters (not even electric typewriters)! He has edited several weekly newspapers across Greater Manchester, been the editor-in-chief of several more and edited a daily newspaper in Northern Ireland. He came home to work on the former Greater Manchester regional TV station Channel M. Having dropped the […]
Find out more about usIf you are interested in harnessing the experience, expertise and professionalism of Cornerstone for your marketing strategy, get in touch!
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Why PR professionals should never take their eyes off the prize
About our PR team
The PR team at Cornerstone is made up of former senior journalists with vast knowledge of, and experience in, the media. And after spending decades in the industry, they instinctively know a good story when they see it. But is that enough to guarantee outstanding PR for your business or organisation?
The answer is not as obvious as you might think.
A PR team resting on its laurels, propped up by the inflated belief they’ve been there, done it and got the T-shirt is not going to deliver for its clients.
PR is always evolving
Why? PR is organic – it is changing all the time, reflecting the society we live in, shaped by the world we live in. A world filled with economic uncertainty, tainted by war, a growing need and desire to be kinder to our planet, burgeoning diversity and inclusivity, rapid developments in technology – especially artificial intelligence. We could go on, but you get the gist.
If PR practitioners don’t keep abreast of their profession, and the world they are operating in, no amount of knowledge and experience will get the best results for their clients. So, let’s take a look at the dominant trends shaping PR today.
CSR – the right PR strategy at the right time
By employing the right PR strategies at the right time, you can maximise good PR. After all, what mattered to consumers three years ago might look very different today.
And since PR is all about shaping your image in the minds of your public, you need to know how certain tactics and strategies may resonate with your audience at any given time, according to TJ Kiely, of the Meltwater media monitoring platform, which our PR team uses to assess and analyse our PR efforts on behalf of our clients.
Another media monitoring platform, Prowly, joined forces with PR Week magazine to ask PR professionals what they thought the biggest PR trends of 2023 would be. More than one in three (31%) thought corporate social responsibility (CSR) would be the most dominant trend.
CSR is a business model by which companies make a concerted effort to operate in ways that enhance rather than degrade society and the environment. That direction of travel came as no surprise to us after working with one of our manufacturing clients to publicise a £1m upgrade of its biomass heating system, making it more efficient and environmentally friendly.
Earned (unpaid-for) coverage on behalf of the client reached an audience just shy of half-a-million, with every media outlet receiving our release using it.
Of course, keeping abreast of trends, means knowing that CSR can be an umbrella term encompassing the big three initiatives of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), CSR (corporate social responsibility), and ESG (environmental, social, and governance).
PR and leadership consultant Tonya McKenzie says: “Consumers have become much more socially conscious. So, it’s only natural that they have a desire for the companies that they spend their money on to do the same.”
According to Gina Nowicki, Prowly’s marketing and communications specialist, this means brands must now dedicate some of their PR efforts to transparently share how they’re making a positive impact on the planet, on their employees, and in their customers’ communities.
The unstoppable trend that is artificial intelligence
If you’ve not heard of, never mind used, ChatGPT so far this year, where have you been?
In the same way Google became the generic term for searching the internet, ChatGPT has come to symbolise the inexorable development of artificial intelligence (AI), the other unstoppable trend that’s got PR professionals sharpening their pencils worldwide.
Almost one-in-five (19%) of PRs surveyed by Prowly and PR Week cited AI as a leading trend of the moment.
But it’s ChatGPT that has garnered the biggest share of positive PR so far, and given the attention it has received worldwide, other technology giants have been quick to follow.
Chat GPT has been described as a ‘Google killer’ as it can be used as a search engine, prompting Google to launch its own version, known as Bard.
And in the latest twist in the race for world AI supremacy, Microsoft has announced it is integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine.
If for some inexplicable reason, all of this excitement has passed you by, you can read all about it in our ChatGPT blog here.
There is no doubt that the fast-growing capabilities of AI are going to have big implications for the PR industry in the years to come.
Matias Rodsevich, CEO of PRLab, says: “The biggest contribution of AI to our profession will be in identifying journalists that could have an interest in our stories.This will help us increase our effectiveness when pitching and help us understand how to tailor our copy to the personalities and styles of the writers we’re in touch with.”
Another more unsettling development – speaking as a human writing this – Reach, once Trinity Mirror, and one of the UK’s biggest publishers, is reported to be experimenting with the use of AI in news writing!
PR that reflects reality
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, surging inflation and interest rates at their highest since 2007, all combine to create levels of uncertainty not experienced in decades. This can have effect on PR.
Writing in US business magazine Forbes, its business council member Alexander Storozhuk says customer trust is paramount in difficult economic times and advocates greater use of user-generated content (UGC).
He says: “Clearly and honestly communicate any changes or challenges your company is facing and be transparent about how they will impact customers. Encourage customers to share their thoughts and concerns, and actively listen to what they are saying by recognising your customers’ challenges and providing practical, actionable steps they can take to mitigate any negative impacts.
“(UGC)…is typically considered more trustworthy and credible than content created by brands or organisations, as it comes from real people and their experiences. With these methods, you can help to build and maintain customer trust even during difficult economic times.”
More trends shaping PR today
As a PR agency serving Manchester and beyond, what other trends are shaping PR today?
- Digital PR and link building – it’s getting more difficult to determine the boundaries between PR and digital marketing, as they intertwine in ways that can amplify results. Link building is a prime example, where PRs now look for clear outcomes like web traffic as part of cross-channel integration strategy.
- Data-driven PR and growing integration of PR software tools – as we’ve already mentioned, our PR team uses media monitoring and analysis software as part of our PR reporting toolkit. This allows us to see information such as how a client’s market share of voice compares to its competitors, the advertising value equivalent of any earned coverage, the audience reach our content garners and more.
- New social media platforms and community management – social media platforms enable brands to connect with their audiences to build identity, drive traffic to their website and build a community of followers to share and engage with their content, all with the ultimate aim of increasing sales. But it appears to us that the PRs surveyed by Prowly and PR Week are getting ahead of themselves when it comes to new media platforms. According to marketing specialist site HubSpot, the six best preforming platforms for marketing this year are all very familiar names – Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter (now X).
What Cornerstone can do for you
You name it, our PR team can do it. And as a full-service agency, we have all the tools – expertise and creativity within marketing strategy, design, digital, web and even print production – to meet all your PR needs.
If you’d like to discuss PR, or wider marketing activities, get in touch and one of our dedicated account managers will get back to you.
Nigel has been a journalist since the days of typewriters (not even electric typewriters)! He has edited several weekly newspapers across Greater Manchester, been the editor-in-chief of several more and edited a daily newspaper in Northern Ireland. He came home to work on the former Greater Manchester regional TV station Channel M. Having dropped the […]
Find out more about usSEO Trends In 2023: What To Expect For SEO in 2023
SEO has come a long way since 1995, and while a lot has changed, the core principle remains the same – how to organically drive more traffic to your website and to get your website to the top of the search results.
When it comes to SEO, search habits change and Search Engines are consistently evolving to provide the best possible result for a user. It’s important to keep up to date with upcoming trends, our abiding message is don’t get left behind, and with that in mind, we’re going to take you on a journey of what to expect of SEO for the remainder of 2023.
Why is it important to keep your SEO knowledge up to date?
In its simplest form, the Google algorithm is built to provide the best result and experience for the user. Since the birth of the internet, Google has been consistently evolving, countless trends and tactics have come and gone.
Many things that worked well in the early days of the internet simply just don’t work anymore, it’s crucial to stay up to date with modern tactics so that your website doesn’t get left behind in the dust and you can prioritise things that will have the biggest impact in 2023.
Despite the Google algorithm consistently changing over time, there are a few basics of SEO that have stuck around, and we think they are here to stay.
Quality content
There is a range of different signals that Google’s algorithm uses to index and rank a page but content has been, and will continue to be, an extremely significant ranking factor.
Without quality content, Google doesn’t have nearly enough information about a page to be able to index it and rank it.
Sure, there are certain keywords/queries that are outliers and don’t necessarily rely purely on content. And sure, there are still other signals that can help a page rank such as the anchor text of a link (backlinks & internal links), title tags, image alt text etc… but the bottom line is, quality content is crux of these signals.
Search engines will crawl the content of a page, and then will process this information for how viable it is for search. Google’s algorithm has developed over the years to record a large range of key signals to help understand the intent of the content. It’s this information that helps to rank a page for a certain keyword.
This process has been the same since the beginning of Google; the only difference is that as time has moved on, Google’s algorithm has advanced; meaning the way it ranks content is much more sophisticated.
As Google continues to push core updates, to improve their search engine, there’s one thing that will continue to stay afloat and that’s quality content. Search engines have the difficult task of understanding what a ‘quality’ result means. Luckily, they don’t leave it up to us to guess…
Google provides a lot of guidance as to what they are looking for with the ‘Search Quality Rater Guidelines’ which is a document that can be used as a reference for conditions and elements that should be considered for creating valuable, high-quality content.
Google also pushes a simple acronym that can be used for creating quality content – E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness), learn more about E-E-A-T later in this article.
Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are often referred to as the currency of the internet and we think that they’ll continue to be for years to come. But why?
Backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors for a page especially from high quality and relevant websites. Links are a signal to Google that the page is trustworthy, credible and authorative; the more links that a page gets, it further strengthens these signals. High quality links have historically been a major ranking factor.
But don’t just take it from us. Take it from Google themselves:
“one of several factors we use to help determine this is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content. This has often proven to be a good sign that the information is well-trusted”
This is just one mentions of links, but Google often references links alongside it being an indication of trust and reputation. You can see these references across their site and official documentation when detailing how they measure the ‘quality’ of a page.
Over the years, Google has rolled out a range of different algorithm updates that tackle backlinks. One of these important updates was Penguin. The Penguin update tackled spammy links, it’s now an essential part of the Google algorithm; it helps Google to better evaluate the quality of links. So, much like content, with links it’s quality over quantity.
High quality backlinks don’t just rely on DR. High quality backlinks need to be highly relevant, reputable/authoritive, and they need to appear natural. Build backlinks with these metrics because they’re are going nowhere!
1. E-E-A-T
Google made significant changes to its Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) for searching in late 2022. Arguably, the most important was the addition of an extra E to the start of the popular acronym E-A-T – Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.
E-A-T has become E-E-A-T, the extra E introducing Experience to the concept, which indicates that quality content can be evaluated through the lens of understanding the extent to which the content creator has first-hand experience of the topic.
Google says experience puts trust at the centre of this new concept, making it the ‘most important member of the E-E-A-T family’.
Google also provides other examples of important concepts, such as:
- Evaluating the reputation of websites and content contributors.
- The extent to which E-E-A-T matters and how it should be evaluated.
- What it means for content to be harmful.
All of this appears to show Google is evolving its language to be more inclusive to keep abreast of the times, recognising social media platforms, influencers and how content can take different forms such as video, UGC and social media posts.
While the extension of the E-A-T acronym to E-E-A-T was the most eye-catching development, Google revealed others that serve as notice of where it wants its algorithms to go.
2. AI content generation
The number of marketing applications that now integrate SEO and artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasing in recent years and we expect that to continue in 2023.
Many content marketers have utilised some types of AI content generators over the past year and they can certainly leverage these tools to help speed up their content workflows and still create original, quality content in the process.
Here are some of the more helpful applications of these tools that do not sacrifice originality:
Content briefs: Content tools that generate content briefs can help writers understand the important keywords, topics, and subtopics that should be included in their original content.
Content outlines: Outlines are a great way to give writers a roadmap for how to create helpful content without relying on AI to do the work for them.
Content ideas: Tools like blog topic generators can speed up the brainstorming process. Moving from a keyword to a helpful content idea can be half the battle, and an idea generator can help prevent writer’s block.
As good as they are, they’ll never better Cornerstone’s expert copywriters!
3. Optimising for entities instead of keywords
An entity in SEO is usually a search, query or set of keywords that can be uniquely identified. Entities utilise context and the relationship/link between elements to discover the intent of a search. An entity is much more than a keyword, it’s typically a topic or a concept.
Optimising for entities in SEO is a tactic that goes beyond simple keyword optimisation as it shifts the focus to more of context optimisation approach. Entity-based optimisation is becoming an effective SEO strategy, a development that goes hand-in-hand with the development of the knowledge panel that now accompanies many Google searches.
Google can understand content with their natural language processing algorithm, it analyses the content of a webpage and associates certain bits of information with an entity.
One example is that a “person” entity is often associated with things such as a name, age, address, birthday… and so on. With enough signals, Google can take this information and associate each of the different details with the person.
Optimising for entities helps to provide Google with enough information to be able to rank web pages without the explicit need for keywords within the content. We obviously wouldn’t recommend not using keywords, this is just an example of the sheer power of optimising for entities!
You can optimise for entities by:
- Building links. Links help to connect entities together and help to declare a relationship between pages. This works with both internal links and backlinks from other websites with anchor text being used to help provide even more context.
- Creating content for a range of different related entities. By covering multiple pieces of content related to a single entity or topic, this strengthens the signals of association for the main topic. For example, here at Cornerstone we have populated our website with content related to our core expertise – like this you’re reading now!
- Building reviews for your business, products or services. Simply put, reviews are a great social signal and they also showcase your authority.
4. More dynamic ways to search
People are not just typing into Google to search anymore. They are using features like Google Lens (to take a picture of a product to find it online) and are using the power of speech recognition to search instead of typing.
This means optimising for long tail keywords is more important as with voice search people are more inclined to search for sentences instead of just single keywords as its takes less time/effort.
The old cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words has taken on new meaning thanks to Google Lens.
It means optimising a website’s imagery is becoming increasingly important as Google needs to clearly ‘see’ images – and quite possible videos soon – to understand what’s on them and find similar objects across the web. So, to make Google see the object in detail, the visuals on your site should be of highest quality possible without impacting page speed metrics (good luck on that one!).
While Google Lens is relatively new, expect it grow in popularity as Google refines its multitask unified model MUM artificial intelligence and natural language understanding algorithm.
The overall message here is make images a part of your SEO strategy, and designing your own, properly sized imagery over stock photographs will help your cause too.
5. Endless scrolling to change the dynamic of CTR
Over the years, the relationship between SERP ranking position and click through rate has remained fairly consistent, with the majority of clicks going to the first three results.
But that is about to change with endless scrolling becoming available on both mobile and desktop. Google is hoping to make it easier for users to scroll through multiple pages of SERP results to find the content they seek.
Previously, if a user got to the bottom of the first page of results and didn’t find what they needed, they’d simply click off and search for something else instead of going to page two, which led to the old joke about the best place to hide something criminally damaging was on page 2 of a Google search!
This is Google’s answer to criticism that its results were degrading in quality and means we could see an increase in CTR and traffic for search results that were previously on page 2.
Although getting to the first page is still ideal, being on pages 2 or 3 will have more benefits than it once did thanks to endless scrolling.
6. AI generated imagery
Artificial intelligence can now generate absolute original images, thanks to the AI that makes this possible maturing significantly in recent years.
SEOs are always on the lookout for innovative technology that can help them amplify content creation effectively and that could be DALLE-2 – but what is it?
It was originally called GPT-2, AI technology that could answer questions, complete text, analyse content, and make conclusions. It was improved to GPT-3 and its capabilities expanded beyond textual information that enabled it to work with images. Scaled up DALLE-2 in 2022, the improved version creates an image just from a text prompt.
Nowadays, website and content promotion are not possible without attractive visuals. Images add more value to your SEO efforts – your site wins more user engagement and accessibility.
But sourcing enough appropriate images has always been a headache. AI can solve this with ease. You just need to print a descriptive prompt of your future image, and AI will come up with a result.
You will need to do some training, such as studying Prompt Book, to master the basics to avoid weird results. But you’ll learn the most valuable tips on how to get the most out of this image generator. It will add to your creativity and speed up the content creation process.
7. Passage indexing
Google passage indexing is an automated feature that pulls sections from pages into search engine results, even if the page covers a slightly different topic from the main one.
Passage indexing is a small tweak to help the search engine understand content better and deliver the best results to searchers, not to be confused with featured snippets.
For example, if you search “what time is it in Paris,” Google provides the answer at the top of the search engine results without requiring you to click on a result.
Passage indexing is an entirely different system that looks at the content of a page, determines if parts of the page answer a search query, and delivers those results in the SERPs. The passage can be viewed in the SERPs in a range of different ways.
Passage indexing naturally favours long-form content, as it will have a better shot at ranking for more keywords. That could mean sites with shorter content take a small hit in ranking as longer-form content gets a boost.
It is also more important than ever for sites to ensure SEO strategies are in place, like using the right heading and optimising anchor text. Pages with less optimisation but better content could outrank you.
If you’ve been avoiding long-form content, now might be the time to give it a go.
8. Video marketing
Videos are the fastest way to relay important information and get your message across. Google is also developing a means of using videos to help searchers find the information they require.
TikTok, Vimeo and YouTube are all popular video marketing platforms, and if you’re not sure about whether or not video marketing should form part of your overall strategy, here are some statistics* that prove it can be an invaluable tool for many businesses:
- You are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google results if your website contains videos.
- It’s possible to increase your conversion rate by 80% by simply displaying a video on your landing page.
- For ecommerce sites, 90% of people state that videos help them make their purchase decisions.
(*ContentBot.ai)
Getting your videos ranked in Google searches is simple. There are two steps you need to take. Step 1 is uploading your videos to YouTube and step 2 is setting the visibility to public. And… that’s it!
What can Cornerstone do for you?
You name it, our digital team can do it. And as a full-service agency, we have all the tools – expertise and creativity within marketing strategy, design, digital, PR and even print production – to meet all your SEO needs.
If you’d like to discuss SEO, or wider marketing activities, get in touch and one of our dedicated account managers will get back to you.
Harrison began his marketing journey five years ago at the tender age of 17 and since then has built up years of combined agency and freelance experience in all sectors of digital marketing. Harrison has worked for companies across Leeds and Greater Manchester and during this time, he has toiled tirelessly to become proficient in […]
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How social media use is changing
BeReal is the ‘anti-Instagram’
On the afternoon of New Year’s Day 2023, 18-year-old twins sitting at a dining table in suburban South Manchester put down their knives and forks and each took a selfie with their smartphone – no fuss, no posing, no group shot; just two fresh-faced young people joining their elders for a festive lunch.
True story, I was there, writes our PR and copywriter Nigel Wareing. But what’s the significance?
If ever there was a physical embodiment of how social media is changing, that was it. They explained to their fellow diners, mostly baby-boomers born in the 50s and 60s, along with their 80-odd-year-old gran, this was BeReal.
BeReal is the ‘anti-Instagram’ – realness instead of ‘Insta-filter’. The idea of this app is quite simple: once a day, at an unspecified time, it asks for a photo. This must actually be taken with a smartphone, front and rear camera triggered simultaneously, there and then, and posted. Job done.
It wasn’t just the embodiment of one new trend, but two: it’s indicative of a new social media standard for authenticity and realness, not just anti-Insta but anti-fake news, anti-deep fake.
Data from Google shows Gen Z, in which our aforementioned twins are firmly ensconced, is a major driver in creating new trends in social media. Let’s take a closer look.
How generations see the internet differently
According to recent data shared by Google, nearly half of young people look to TikTok or Instagram instead of Google search or Google maps when they’re looking for something or somewhere, thus creating an expectation that the number of Google searches in 2023 will fall for the first time since 2018.
The research found that while Gen Z are more likely to buy online than baby boomers, they’re less likely to describe purchasing as a top benefit of the internet (25% vs 44%). Instead, community and interests are given a lot more credence (23% vs 10%). In other words, younger audiences start their searches from a place of curiosity and expect to be sped on a fun rollercoaster of new ideas, rather than directed to a list of brands or products.
What’s that telling us? It’s the older generation that relies on using search engines, while the fundamental way the internet is used by younger people will continue to evolve, adding even more weight to the principle that successful marketing is based on knowing and engaging with your audience.
What’s eating Google?
According to marketing guru Neil Wilkins, TikTok and Reddit are eating away at Google search, while TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts get 50+ billion views worldwide every day – seven years ago this content category didn’t exist, and advertisers are still catching up.
Now, this might sound like a contradiction in terms, given what we’ve just said about the potential for declining numbers of Google searches, but YT Shorts are now appearing in Google search results too, providing another channel for marketers to think about.
A word of warning though, and some sage advice, courtesy of SocialMediaExaminer, which says: “Do what’s right for you and don’t follow the crowd. Not every person or brand has the personality to be goofy on TikTok. But everyone can probably be educational or informal. Instead of shooting for a style you don’t find comfortable, find what you can provide via video that’s useful to the audience you’re trying to reach.”
Is the cookie crumbling?
2023 was finally meant to bring the long-delayed demise of third-party cookies but once again Google has delayed the end of cookies until 2024 to allow testing and uptake of its Privacy Sandbox APIs.
While consumers are concerned about the lack of privacy cookies bring, 70% of advertisers feel that digital advertising overall will take a step backward because of their removal, according to the listening and analytics platform Talkwalker, which has worked with Khoros, an award-winning customer engagement platform, to provide insights into 2023’s social media trends.
The clock is ticking, and new alternatives must be activated sooner rather than later.
Dr Karen Sutherland, a senior lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, tells Talkwalker: “…The continued limitations placed on the capacity to target (and retarget), it has become more important than ever for businesses to foster authentic relationships with customers by providing relevant problem-solving content, positive interactions (online and offline) and building their email lists to communicate directly with consumers.”
Keep it real, keep it transparent
We’ve already spoken about BeReal, but as a new kid on the social media block, businesses and marketers are still trying to work out its potential, especially as its popularity continues to increase steadily.
Again, at the risk of repeating ourselves, it’s growing popularity is indicative of the broader trend for realness and transparency.
According to SocialMediaExaminer, ‘authenticity rules over curated perfection’.
And the InfluencerMarketingHub says: “Consumers nowadays demand authenticity from brands, with 86% of consumers saying that transparency has now become more important than ever. Aside from transparency, today’s consumers expect businesses to nurture authentic human connections and build an emotional connection to a brand.”
With confidence in customer reviews declining due to negative media coverage such as this by the BBC, ‘TripAdvisor defends itself in fake reviews row’, vet your reviews diligently.
What’s the next big thing?
BeReal is also an example of a growing number of decentralised social networks, which are expected to be the next big thing.
For example, Minds.com is an open-source alternative to popular social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, while Mastodon is quickly becoming a Twitter alternative. One of the benefits of these decentralised networks is that it gives you – and us – the opportunity to do our work without the shadow of Big Brother algorithms.
This trend is emerging amid growing concern about the lack of control the individual has on their social media network(s) of choice. Decisions are determined by those that run the network. Consumers rarely have any say.
The rise of decentralised social networks will enable more user control, making the big hitters sit up and take notice. Expect to see major social platforms tackling more of the issues consumers raise and possibly putting power into the hands of their users.
Adding a fourth P to the rule of thirds
This is the year when the rule of thirds social media content balance of personal, point, and promote is joined by planet.
Growing awareness of rising global temperatures means consumers are now increasingly mindful of the direct repercussions their buying decisions could make to climate change. There’s a genuine concern for humanity’s impact on our planet.
The expectation is that every brand needs to make a concerted effort to make a difference. And that doesn’t mean lip service and buzzwords.
As awareness grows, more and more companies are being called out for ‘green-washing’ – not a good look on social media.
According to Talkwalker, 82% of consumers want businesses to put people and the planet before profit. Now there’s a marketing challenge with another P – purpose!
It’s space Jim, but not as we know it
Okay, Dr Spock didn’t really say that to Captain Kirk in Star Trek (in fact, he said nothing of the sort, it’s a popular misquote), but our misquote of a misquote is a good way of describing the growing influence of the Metaverse.
Of course, the space in question is the internet and the Metaverse with its multi-sensory social media is the catalyst of a market believed to be worth about $800 billion, according to PR Week. Some brands are already on board this Starship Enterprise, such as Klarna, for example. Expect more to follow.
And while we’re in the realms of making the stuff of sci-fi reality, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) will have roles to play in the evolution of social media.
The number of marketing applications that now integrate AI has been increasing in recent years and we expect that to continue in 2023.
Many content marketers are already utilising some types of AI content generators to help speed up their workflows and still create original, quality content in the process.
Here are some of the more helpful applications of these tools:
- Content briefs: Content tools that generate content briefs can help writers understand the important keywords, topics, and subtopics that should be included in their original content.
- Content outlines: Outlines are a great way to give writers a roadmap for how to create helpful content without relying on AI to do the work for them.
- Content ideas: Tools like blog topic generatorscan speed up the brainstorming process. Moving from a keyword to a helpful content idea can be half the battle, and an idea generator can help prevent writer’s block.
Predictive analytics, meanwhile, isn’t new. It’s been used in underwriting and credit scoring for several years, using existing big data to predict potential future outcomes.
We’ll see more marketing and social media professionals start to integrate predictive analytics into their processes. Social listening can quickly and easily provide big data, and now we’ll see the AI capabilities catch up to provide accurate and valuable predictions.
What can Cornerstone do for you?
You name it, our digital team can do it. And as a full-service agency, we have all the tools – expertise and creativity within marketing strategy, design, digital, PR and even print production – to meet all your social media marketing needs.
Our social media marketing activity for one client has seen their Facebook page following grow 6,500 – a 9% year-on-year (YoY) increase. In one month, the page reached 183,000 followers – a 22% increase YoY. It included 96,959 from paid reach and 92,187 from organic reach.
If you’d like to know more about how our social media team can help your business or organisation
Social media servicesGet in touch with usPutting the power of communication in your own hands – allow us to introduce to you InnoScreen
Capture your audience’s attention
Allow us to introduce you to InnoScreen – a web-based, digital signage solution that allows businesses, brands and organisations to tailor their communications to their target audience via strategically positioned smart TV screens or digital signage screens.
We’ve developed this innovative, accessible, and cost-effective digital signage software with so many clients embracing digital technology and telling us of their desire to communicate with stakeholders on the premises.
It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in – leisure, retail, health, manufacturing, pharmaceutical or food – excellent communication is paramount when it comes to customer and stakeholder satisfaction.
From receptions and waiting zones to office social spaces, retail areas and restaurant settings, with our InnoScreen solution you can broadcast your messaging and crucial information to the right people – often a captive audience – at the right time. All you need is a basic internet connection.
Bespoke to your business and brand strategy, our InnoScreen platform literally puts the power of communication in your hands. And while it gives you extreme flexibility and autonomy over the content, we’re with you every step of the way when it comes to aligning your output with your marketing strategy by assisting with asset creation – be it imagery or video.
We provide all the expertise you need
If you don’t already have digital signage displays and smart screens, we provide the expertise when it comes to supply, installation and maintenance.
As an InnoScreen user, you’ll be given a client admin account which will enable you to create and customise your campaigns using uploaded assets: including videos (MP4, Youtube and Vimeo), images, pre-designed and branded slides, as well as the ability to use our rich HTML builder, allowing for various assets to be built within our platform quickly and easily.
By simply dragging and dropping the assets you want to use, you can generate single or multiple feeds and control the location of those feeds if you have multiple screens.
You can discover more about our accessible and cost-effective InnoScreen platform here
Here’s the science (well, sort of…)
Don’t worry, InnoScreen isn’t complicated. In the slightest. We’ve done all the hard work for you.
You may already have screens in place, if not where you position them is entirely up to you – we recommend areas of high footfall, receptions, waiting rooms or street-facing window displays.
By simply dragging and dropping the assets you want to use, you can generate single or multiple feeds and control the location of those feeds if you have multiple screens.
You can control users, slide duration time, campaign launch dates and times, content, orientation (landscape or portrait) and most importantly, tailor messaging to a specific need, be it planned or reactively at the drop of a hat.
The platform has been developed specifically to simplify the user experience, ensuring campaign creation is straightforward and efficient.
Why small screen?
It’s no secret, communications to all audiences need to engage and resonate.
You could choose to believe that fact is driven by the unrelenting digital age, an increasingly impatient demand for instant, much briefer communications fuelled by the habit of scrolling mobile devices on the move.
And while that does play a part, the truth lies in our pre-programmed auditory and visual sense.
Brains are wired to remember imagery. Hear some information and research shows that three days later you’ll only remember 10 per cent of it. Add a picture, and you’ll recall 65 per cent, according to Brain Rules by John Medina, a US-based molecular biologist focussed on the development of the human brain.
Therefore, movement and sound are proven to be much more effective in conveying efficient messaging and that’s exactly what InnoScreen is designed for.
In addition to the fact retail industry research reports almost 70% of surveyed customers say digital signage would make them more likely to purchase advertised products1, it can increase sales by 29.5% and encourage up to 30% more customer browsing time, it’s certainly a trend business can’t afford to ignore.
Go-live time!
Because we have every confidence you’ll never look back after using InnoScreen we’re offering a FREE 30-day account software trial and demo, which can be used on any smart TV.
You’ll get the chance to discover just how simple it is to run your own campaigns, upload assets and, essentially, just how effective it is in converting your messaging into your strategic objectives, from sales to new members or a more engaged workforce.
Get in touch to gain your free trial today.
References:
Nigel has been a journalist since the days of typewriters (not even electric typewriters)! He has edited several weekly newspapers across Greater Manchester, been the editor-in-chief of several more and edited a daily newspaper in Northern Ireland. He came home to work on the former Greater Manchester regional TV station Channel M. Having dropped the […]
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‘This song sucks!’ Rock star has say on ChatGPT AI-created lyrics
Can artificial intelligence call the tune on content creation?
This song sucks! Legendary rock star Nick Cave didn’t hold back when one of his fans sent him lyrics created by an artificial intelligence (AI) system that had been tasked with writing a song in the style of the Bad Seeds frontman.
The words had been created by ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that has been trained to generate content and human-like responses to prompts, such as asking for a song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’.
Despite its attempts to re-create Cave’s dark religious imagery, the singer branded the lyrics ‘a grotesque mockery’ and ‘a travesty’, reported BBC News.
And yet, if I was a betting man, I might be tempted to head to the bookies and have a little dabble on when the first chart-topping song to be written by AI would come about. Would it be in the next three…two…one year? Pondering on the chances, I asked ChatGPT what it reckoned, and this is the answer…
Not a bad answer at all, in my opinion.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT (the GPT stands for generative pre-training) was only launched as a prototype on 30th November 2022. Since then, it has created quite a stir on social media – although that should come with an understatement alert.
Announcing its arrival, its creators, US-based OpenAI, said: “We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
“We are excited to introduce ChatGPT to get users’ feedback and learn about its strengths and weaknesses. During the research preview, usage of ChatGPT is free.”
Following the release, OpenAI was valued at $US 29billion. Given the attention ChatGPT has received, not to mention OpenAI’s market valuation, the other tech giants have been quick to jump on the bandwagon.
ChatGPT has been described as a ‘Google killer’ as it can be used as a search engine, prompting Google to launch its own version, known as Bard.
Meanwhile, some schools in the US and Australia have banned students from using ChatGPT out of fear they could use it to complete their assignments.
And in the latest twist in the race for world AI supremacy, Microsoft has announced it is integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!
What is ChatGPT good for?
If and when you use ChatGPT keep in mind that it’s clever, but not that clever. It’s just a machine that has no ulterior motive or purpose. It does not want to help or mislead you; it has no concept of what is real and no morals. It is what it is – AI that generates text based on a lot of information it has been trained on.
Even though its uneven factual accuracy has been identified as a significant drawback, it still has its uses, and here are some of them.
- Finding a needle in a haystack
Well, sort of. ChatGPT is fairly good at summing up long pieces of text. This comes in handy when you need to quickly scan reams of a report, studies, and other documents. You can even ask the tool to give you the most important points, pick up a quote or find information about the author(s). - Questions and answers
ChatGPT can help you conduct research about events, individuals and pretty much anything else. Be warned though, it will cheerfully make stuff up if it does not know the answer. - Creating headlines
If you are doing A/B testing, challenge yourself with your headlines vs the AI. You can ask it for different versions of a headline: funny, negative, or positive, remove the jargon or make it into a specific number of words. Another warning though, ChatGPT struggles with maths as much as an ageing blog writer who never passed his maths exam! - Generating email subjects and writing emails
Although you will need to edit the final version, ChatGPT can speed up the process of emailing your clients or colleagues as you can generate a sound message with one swift prompt. Just fill in the blanks and send it away. A genuine time-saver. - Generating social posts
Posting on socials is useful but can be time-consuming. You can ask ChatGPT to write a tweet or a LinkedIn post on a topic, freeing your time and brainpower for more worthwhile writing. As always, check before posting. - Providing context
You can ask ChatGPT to give you context about a topic, and it can also explain how something works, which might be useful if you need to explain something in simple language. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record – check the results.
What is ChatGPT not so good for?
Check maths, names and places, and always make sure that everything ChatGPT creates for you is real and/or actual.
The tool has also been known to give biased answers. For example, it has been trained on what humans, past and present, have written about women or minorities. Although it has been reportedly trained not to give sexist or racist answers, make sure you do not use anything that may cause offence or harm.
- Accuracy!
Despite its pretty decent answer to my music-related question earlier, ChatGPT’s uneven factual accuracy has been quickly identified in its short lifespan to date.As alluded to earlier, it is not averse to making stuff up. For example, you can ask it for subject matter experts or information about a topic, but what it tells you is not always accurate, especially if the topic is too niche, where you might find the tool generating totally fictional names.
- Lost in translation?
Like any other AI-powered translation tool, ChatGPT is very approximative. However, it can come in handy if you need to get a general sense of text in a different language. If you want to get something a bit more accurate, stick with Google Translate.
What do we think of ChatGPT?
Always at the cutting edge of technology, some of the Cornerstone team have been putting ChatGPT to the test in the course of their day-to-day work.
One of them is our Head of Digital, Jess, who says: “When one of our account managers recently briefed us on a new client campaign proposal, instead of grabbing pen and paper to start brainstorming, I copy and pasted elements of the brief into ChatGPT and asked it to create five slogans.
“Once it had returned those, I asked it to give me five more. The campaign really needed to evoke emotion, so I then asked it to write a poem based on everything I’d told it so far. I took all the responses to our creative campaign planning meeting, and we had a really strong base to start generating ideas for campaign messaging, tying it into other ideas from the PR and creative teams too.
“I think using ChatGPT as a starter for ten to get your creative juices flowing is going to save a lot of time at campaign ideation stage.”
Another is Harrison, our SEO guru. He says: “I’ve used ChatGPT to generate content ideas, I’ll ask it something along the lines of – give me content ideas for certain keyword-related topics – and this will usually help me to get started with keyword research. I’ve tried using it to generate content, but I’ve not really liked what it’s given me – maybe I’ve just not used the right prompts?”
The age-old question…could robots replace humans?
When I first considered writing this blog, I asked one of our account managers if she could put some time in my work planner to write about ChatGPT.
“What’s that?” she asked, to which I flippantly replied: “It’s a type of chatbot that can originate content that will replace me!”
But it would be remiss of me to look at the strengths and weaknesses of this advanced example of AI and not pose the age-old question – could AI ever replace humans?
I couldn’t resist posing the question to the bot itself, and here is the answer…
It’s also been said AI can’t think outside the box. True, but then again, that can also be said of some humans!
With thanks to Marcela Kunova of Journalism.co.uk for the inspiration and some of the information in this article.
Nigel has been a journalist since the days of typewriters (not even electric typewriters)! He has edited several weekly newspapers across Greater Manchester, been the editor-in-chief of several more and edited a daily newspaper in Northern Ireland. He came home to work on the former Greater Manchester regional TV station Channel M. Having dropped the […]
Find out more about usFrom simple tasks to personal assistants – the rise of the ChatBot
What are chatbots?
If you’ve ever required customer support over the last few years, chances are you’ve encountered a ChatBot.
ChatBots are programmes built to automatically engage with received messages. They can be programmed to respond the same way each time, to respond differently to messages containing certain keywords and even to use machine learning to adapt their responses to fit the situation.
Whichever way they are programmed, it’s safe to say they’re now more responsive, smarter and can make a huge difference to the customer-facing side of a business. Advancements in technology mean chatbots are also more personalised and useful than ever.
Sometimes called a ‘conversational agent’, ChatBots can be used for a wide variety of businesses across all sorts of sectors. They are exceptionally useful for answering quick queries, offering customers a helpful, instant response 24/7, 365 days-a-year.
What chatbots can do for business
ChatBots boost operational efficiency and bring cost savings to businesses while offering convenience and added services to internal employees and external customers. They allow companies to easily resolve many types of customer queries and issues while reducing the need for human interaction.
In short, they can:
- Handle a multitude of queries and questions at the same time.
- Reduce customer service costs.
- Increase customer engagement.
- Improve customer experience – it’s ‘always on’!
- Reduce the number of phone call and email enquiries.
- Increase lead generation.
Businesses that rely solely on ‘human power’ – staff in other words – can only serve a limited number of people at one time. ChatBots on the other hand, allow businesses to engage with an unlimited number of customers in a personal way and can be scaled up or down according to demand and business needs.
By using ChatBots, a business can provide humanlike, personalised, proactive service to hundreds of people at the same time.
Why were chatbots created?
Visit most business websites and they’ll have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and troubleshooting sections, with the aim of cutting down on costly human interaction.
ChatBots provide a personal alternative to a written FAQs, and they can even triage questions, including handing off a customer issue to a live person – known as LiveChat – if the issue becomes too complex for the chatbot to resolve.
The history of the chatbot
If ChatBots seem like a manifestation of the digital age, you might be surprised to discover the origins arguably date back to the 1940s, and the history includes one Alan Turing – the Manchester mathematician now revered in his home city, and beyond, for his wartime role breaking the Germans’ Enigma code, and said by many to be the creator of the world’s first computer.
Turing wrote a paper suggesting how to test a ‘thinking’ machine. In his book, A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, Keith D Foote writes: “(Turing) believed if a machine could carry on a conversation by way of a teleprinter, imitating a human with no noticeable differences, the machine could be described as thinking.”
And so artificial intelligence was born. Since then, AI – the foundation for ChatBots – has progressed to include super-intelligent supercomputers.
The original ChatBot was the phone tree, which led phone-in customers on an often cumbersome and frustrating path of selecting one option after another to wind their way through an automated customer service model. That experience has evolved into today’s digital assistants providing pop-up, live, onscreen chats.
What are the common uses of chatbot?
With an intelligent chatbot, common tasks such as password updates, system status, outage alerts, and knowledge management can be readily automated and made available 24/7, while broadening access to commonly used voice and text-based conversational interfaces.
Business uses are most commonly based around customer service, such as customer contact centres to manage incoming communications and direct customers to the information they are looking for.
From a consumer perspective, chatbots perform a variety of customer services, ranging from ordering event tickets to booking and checking into hotels, to comparing products and services. They are also commonly used to perform routine customer activities in all sorts of sectors from retail to banking.
Supporting Live Chat
Certain chatbots, like the chatbot developed by us, offers the functionality to host ‘agents’. This allows you to have real people available to speak to ChatBot users if their queries can’t be fulfilled.
By using a dedicated team operating as live chat agents, you’re able to relieve pressure on customer service teams operating over the phone, by email or in your physical locations.
It also increases the accessibility of your ChatBot because, let’s be honest, there are still people who would rather speak to a human!
ChatBots – the misconceptions
Although the terms ChatBot and bot are sometimes used interchangeably, a bot is simply an automated programme that can be used either for legitimate or malicious purposes – and that’s where the negativity comes from as the word bot has been linked to a history of hackers using automated programmes to infiltrate, usurp, and generally cause havoc in the digital ecosystem.
Bots and ChatBots, therefore, should not be confused. Generally speaking, chatbots do not have a history of being used for hacking, they are simple conversational tools performing routine tasks. In fact, chatbots are generally very popular because they provide simple solutions quickly.
ChatBots – the future
According to Forbes, the leading US business magazine, ChatBots could play an even more elaborate role in everyday life as they evolve further.
From a customer-facing point of view, they could develop to understand multiple messages – such as a complaint and some praise all in one message – and answer and supply more than one source of information in a message, for example, what is the weather like in Portugal and how much does it cost to fly there?
We know the idea of ChatBots can be a little intimidating. After all, while some robots warm our hearts – like Alexa or Siri – others can be a little scary for some who think robots are here to take over the world. Rather than the latter, robots are here to make life easier, as our Cornerstone chatbot offer will prove.
How to setup a ChatBot
Marketed in the right way, it’s simple to introduce your customers to a new ChatBot service that will become a natural part of your customer service journey and brand. Find out more about our ChatBot offering and how we can implement a ChatBot onto any website, improving your customer brand experience.
15 milestones that define Cornerstone
Anniversaries come and go, but as the latest is the 15th for Cornerstone DM, we thought we’d make a special mention of it.
And in keeping with the creativity that is the lifeblood of our full-service agency, we didn’t want to share our birthday in a conventional way. Instead, we’ve collated 15 pivotal milestones that define Cornerstone.
Every story has a beginning, so let’s start with milestone number 1
Working alone from the attic of his parent’s home, MD David Wadsworth founded Oldham-based Cornerstone DM with a £1,000 overdraft and not even a single client in 2007. Soon, David’s fiancée Sarah Smethurst, an avid designer, joined for two days a week before going full-time after six months.
The next ‘office’ was a spare bedroom of David and Sarah’s first home together, which then led to Cornerstone’s first ‘proper’ office – a triangular 400 sq. ft. unit at Woodend Mills in Lees, where the couple and their respective brothers turned a dirty, dank industrial unit into what David describes as a ‘fairly cool office’.
Growing staff numbers – including Huddersfield Uni graduate designer Nic, our first ever hire (who is still with us) – necessitated a move to bigger premises at 112 High Street, Lees – palatial in comparison to its forerunner.
David says: “We’d been three students learning our trade but by the time we moved to 112 High Street, we were taking on bigger pieces of work and extending our services to include things like SEO, web work and PPC for a growing list of clients. When we first moved to Woodend Mills it felt like we were really becoming an agency and now we’d got even bigger.”
Below: Before and after images of Cornerstone’s first studio at Woodend Mills
Number 2: Leisure clients – the start of something big
Cornerstone has forged an unrivalled reputation for providing full-service marketing expertise and creativity in support of the leisure and wellbeing industry, working with several local authority leisure trusts and associated organisations – many of which have come to us through word-of-mouth recommendations.
This journey began with Oldham Community Leisure (OCL), our very first leisure client, which soon sparked interest from others seeing their activity take place.
David explains: “We’d been working with OCL for a while and we wanted to do more but they’d always had an incumbent agency, it was difficult to break through that because lots of other trusts were using them. But OCL kept pressure testing us and every time they did we exceeded all expectations, met ridiculous deadlines and did a cracking job.
“We finally made the breakthrough, and that was quickly followed by work for Active Tameside, and then Link4Life. Everybody Leisure came on board in 2016 and then we were recommended to Burnley Leisure and Culture (BLC).”
Our leisure portfolio now totals 15 and is growing fast thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations.
Number 3: North West Ambulance Service – our first major client!
The relationship, which is still in place today, came about when NWAS needed a re-brand after moving to foundation trust status in 2008 and was the result of a recommendation from another Cornerstone client.
Two of our campaigns for NWAS – Star In A Car and Make The Right Call – proved hugely successful.
Star In A Car was a regional search for volunteer car drivers to transport patients to routine hospital appointments and was oversubscribed within days of it being launched.
The aim of Make The Right Call was to people to the fact that using A&E or 999 for non-emergencies could take essential help away from someone who really needs it.
Both secured gold accolades at the 2019 Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ North West PRide Awards – the UK’s most prestigious nationwide awards scheme recognising excellence in public relations and communications.
David says: “Twelve or 13 years on, NWAS is still a client and great advocate of Cornerstone. I’d say winning that account was a pivotal moment in our development, because it is a great public sector organisation to work with, and it’s good to be linked with an organisation so crucial to our communities, playing such a pivotal role in the health and wellbeing of our family, friends and loved ones.”
Number 4: Pharma clients – another shot in the arm
Our introduction to pharma came in 2017, again via a referral, when our ability to produce outstanding work to tight deadlines won us a brief to create a launch campaign for a range of herbal remedy products and support it with a dedicated microsite. Ultimately, the product was shelved at the last minute, but we’d proved ourselves and were rewarded with an account exceeding £250,000pa.
Since then, we’ve gone on to work with national and multinational pharma brands, seeing our work appear across trade and consumer channels, cover both above and below the line media.
We gained approval from the Proprietary Association of Great Britain (PAGB), representing the manufacturers of branded over-the-counter medicines, self-care medical devices and food supplements in the UK.
David says: “There are some big agencies in that sector but there is a place for an agency like us – we’re fully integrated and bring agility and nimbleness to the way we work.
“Our fully integrated approach, with a highly skilled team, all employed internally; set us apart from many of our competitors. Before working with Cornerstone, many clients have been known to use one agency for SEO, one for web development, maybe brand / creative and another for PR for instance, and it begins to feel fragmented for the client. Our approach is to do it all in a fully integrated manner, all in one team and all delivering to clear, distinct, and commercially aligned objectives.”
Number 5: Print room – a new string to our bow
Our highly specialised production studio and signage division began life while we were still based at Woodend Mills and has grown in size and capability with every office move since, culminating in an impressive, purpose-built new workspace when we moved to new premises in 2019 (more on that later), which has ramped up our capabilities to a whole new level.
“The introduction of the print room fuelled an additional layer of growth because it gave us an extra service we could offer clients,” says David. “It’s come a long way since we leased extra space at Woodend Mill and knocked the wall through to create our very first print room.
Number 6: The pandemic – putting welfare at the heart of everything
Wellbeing was our main driver when the pandemic struck, that was the welfare of the Cornerstone team as well as the best interests of our clients and suppliers.
David explains: “At the start of the pandemic, we saw a lot of organisations making people redundant. Our approach was completely different. It was total transparency with the team. We said if no single client spent a penny in the foreseeable, we had six months where we could sustain everybody. We cut unnecessary spending to help safeguard everyone and we worked quicker, harder, more strategically than we’d ever done. Every piece of work we went for we won – with the exception of one – and when it was won, it was delivered to high standards, and fast.”
As an agency with scruples, we spoke to most of our clients to understand the impact on their businesses. For those who were hardest hit we extended payment plans and offered pure flexibility. It was very much ‘we are in this together and we’ll get through it together’ scenario. One of our hardest hit clients paid a bill from February 2020 only last month – we truly went above and beyond in that particular instance.
We also offered a number of clients discounted fees for certain projects which would help them build better in a post-covid world. This helped them better engage with their markets, grow, and be profitable.
Number 7: Breaking through the £1m barrier
The pandemic solidified us as a business, and we posted a 10% growth in revenue that year – with better profitability than the year before, in fact, which meant our turnover in 2020 passed £1m for the first time.
Turnover increased to £1.2m in 2021 and this year we have exceeded £1.7m, easily beating our initial goal of £1.5m.
“We’ve put a huge level of investment into this year too. It could appear that we are over resourced at the moment but that is preparation for 2023. That has hit our profitability this year, but the plan is to make it up next year. The other way of looking at it, is that we’re investing in the future,” says David.
Number 8: PR – the final piece of the creative jigsaw
The addition of our dedicated PR department in 2017 was the final piece of the Cornerstone full-service jigsaw. Before then, PR had been an ad-hoc activity that we had undertaken for a handful of clients who had occasionally asked us to write a press release or provide them with some other form of written content.
That all changed when our erstwhile PR Manager, Robbie Macdonald, who had just been made redundant by the closure of the Oldham Chronicle, suggested the idea of a full-time, dedicated department to MD David. The agreement was to give it a six-month trial, which in Robbie’s case, turned into a four-year stay at Cornerstone. As our PR offering flourished, Robbie – now part of the BBC-funded Local Democracy Reporting Service – was joined by our current PR Manager Gill.
David says: “Our PR offer has evolved massively over the years; it has become a strong and important part of what we do. PR is often overlooked in a number of industries, but it is actually central to brand presence and delivery and looking at content as a whole it is the difference between excellence or mainstream mundane if you don’t have the right PR professionals.”
Number 9: Watching staff blossom
Nurturing its staff is key to Cornerstone’s success. Employees have undertaken 248 days of training in the past 12 months, representing as much as 35 per cent of the web team’s total timesheet. Other notable training times include 28 per cent for the account management team and 23 per cent for digital.
Leaders of the future are also being nurtured. For example, Head of Client Services, Sarah, first joined us as an Account Manager before becoming Senior Account Manager.
Our Head of Digital, Jess, has enjoyed a similar trajectory, coming to us as an account executive in 2017 following freelance roles within marketing and PR fields. Exploring her passion for all thing digital, Jess embarked on several training courses and became Cornerstone’s dedicated digital marketer within 12 months of joining the team.
And the development goes on. Our Finance and HR Manager Ali is furthering her career with a CIPD course at Tameside College, which we are sponsoring, and our Junior Digital Marketing Executive Madeline is Cornerstone’s first-ever degree apprentice! She’s currently working towards a Level 6 Digital Marketing Degree qualification after achieving a distinction in her Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship with us.
Apprentice Software Developer Hannah is two-thirds(ish) way through her Level 3 Software Technician Apprenticeship, and her colleague in our web department, Joe, our junior web developer, is combining his three-year Computer Science degree at Manchester Metropolitan University while working part-time at Cornerstone.
“We have a commitment to developing careers and team satisfaction. That’s something I’m very proud of,” says David.
Number 10: Acorn Street, Lees – breaking the mould by staying in Oldham
You don’t have to be based in Manchester to be excellent marketers! That’s always been the Cornerstone mantra.
After outgrowing every office space we’d ever had, we arrived at our current premises here in Lees – a dynamic, in-house designed and redeveloped creative studio space which reflects Cornerstone’s drive and ethos.
The reveal of our £250,000 refurbished new working space came in 2020 when we hosted the Professional Oldham networking group.
“We’d been looking for new premises for 18-24 months, but I really wanted us to stay in Oldham,” explains David. “Typically, a question many people ask in our industry is why don’t you move into Manchester? My usual reply is I don’t have to be in Manchester to be good at my job, and neither does my team.
“People often run Oldham down, saying it needs investment and should have more to offer, so I thought that’s what we’ve got to do, we have to be in Oldham and be a business that can be acknowledged as a leader and a worthwhile employer. It took a long time to find something that was suitable, but here we are, and looking like we might outgrow it already!”
Number 11: New faces, new clients, new achievements
A raft of new business wins and new recruits have made Cornerstone’s 15th year one to remember, even improving on 2021’s best-ever achievements.
This year (2022) has seen a 51% growth in business that includes three new leisure trusts, automotive storage specialists Linco Automotive, a North West-based SME providing consultancy, design, supply, and installation services to prestige car dealerships; and London-based Cheetah Transformation, which works with clients in the UK and abroad to build, implement and support the adoption of a global workflow management system.
Other wins include global brands such as Digital Projection and Trust Green, which provides a devoted and masterful approach to the long-term stewardship of open spaces.
David says: “We’re working with regional, national, and international firms across several industries. 2022 has been an exceptional year for us, and with more new business in the pipeline, we are going from strength to strength.
“We’ve bolstered the team with more resource across several disciplines to maintain our exceptional standards and high-quality outputs.
“Everything we do is based on our founding principles – results, reputation and relationships. Testimony to that is the number of potential new clients coming to us following word-of-mouth recommendations from our existing clients.”
With a staffing figure of 30 – our biggest ever – new recruits have augmented account management, digital, creative, operational and web teams, and we’ve recruited a Business Development Manager initially to maximise the potential of the agency’s signage operation before turning his attention to our other innovations and services.
Number 12: Recognising expertise
For the past two years, a guiding hand on the Cornerstone tiller has been our Senior Management Team (SMT), the creation of which was necessary to keep abreast of our growth and development, but also has proved to be the driver of further success.
Led by MD David, it is made up of head of creative Sarah S, HR & finance manager Ali, head of client services Sarah B and head of digital Jess, all supported by departmental managers.
“Recognising the expertise of our senior people and formalising them into SMT has been a pivotal part of our growth,” says David. “There’s now five to seven of us including departmental managers driving the business forward.”
Our expertise is being recognised on a wider stage too, with our PR Manager Gill sharing her knowledge, and information about us, with various schools and colleges in Oldham, digital lead Jess being called in to give SEO advice to several organisations and digital apprentice Maddy is leading on an apprenticeship network as she studies.
And let’s not forget MD David, who has forged a distinguished reputation not only within our industry but in the leisure sector too.
Number 13: Innovation to improve communication
Innovation and creation is in our DNA, and that has seen us launch two new products this year – the Cornerstone ChatBot and our InnoScreen digital signage platform.
ChatBots can be used for a wide variety of businesses across all sorts of sectors. They are exceptionally useful for answering quick queries, offering customers a helpful, instant response 24/7, 365-days-a-year – great for improving customer experience.
While ChatBot is fully automated, we can build LiveChat into our service. We set up a client’s ChatBot to answer customer questions as much as possible until it gets to a point where they can choose to start a live chat with a member of a customer service team.
Our InnoScreen platform is a web-based, digital signage software which allows businesses, brands and organisations to tailor their communications to their target audience via strategically positioned smart TV screens.
From receptions and waiting zones to office social spaces, retail areas and restaurant settings, our InnoScreen solution a client can broadcast their messaging and crucial information to the right people – often a captive audience – at the right time.
Number 14: Let’s party!
We do love a good knees-up! Time’s flown by since we held a party to celebrate the agency’s 10th anniversary and we’re following suit this time with an Oscars-themed, red carpet event complete with food and live music at our Lees studio.
Having a good time is nothing unusual for the Cornerstone team. Our busy social calendar is anchored by our Christmas party in December (when else?) and summer barbecue each June. Other dates for the diary include go-karting, indoor climbing, quiz nights, games evenings, crazy golf, Flight Club darts and clambering up Saddleworth’s hills, among others. We work hard. We play hard!
Number 15: It’s a great place to work
Our final milestone is not so much a pivotal event or new highlight, but something more esoteric – and that is Cornerstone’s culture.
The friendly team striving for excellence in a supportive environment has always been there, but with more and more new people coming on board, it is now more recognisable than ever.
Last word to MD David: “It takes a lot of graft to get the right people and the right personalities with the right ethics. It’s been a huge focus of mine over the years, and it’s been a focus of how I’ve trained SMT to go and recruit people in the same way. Just anyone isn’t who I want, and it’s not the way I’ve wanted to build the business.
“I’m proud of what I’ve built over the past 15 years, and I don’t ever want to entrust it to anyone other than decent, like-minded people.
I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing what the next fifteen years holds for Cornerstone, and would like to take this opportunity to thank clients, team members and suppliers, both past and present for the part they’ve played so far.”
The ever-changing media and PR landscape
In their 1960s heyday a big city evening newspaper outside of London could sell upwards of 300-400,000 copies a day. Indeed, the Manchester Evening News peaked at 480,000 copies a night following its merger with the Manchester Chronicle.
The MEN – once the UK’s largest provincial newspaper – averaged 20,300 copies per issue between January and June of 2022, according to the latest data available from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC). That’s not strictly a fair comparison, as back in the 60s, the MEN produced several editions a day covering a period spanning (roughly) lunchtime to early evening. These days it is just the one issue printed the night before it hits the newsstands.
But this is not a MEN-bashing exercise. Replace the scenario outlined above with that of any regional daily in the UK, and you’ll discover a similar story. It’s the same with weekly newspapers too – while some of today’s weeklies were once dailies that their publishers deemed too expensive to produce on a daily basis given their dwindling circulations, so changed the frequency to a more cost-effective weekly option.
However, as a writer for an Oldham-based business, I’ve chosen the MEN because it is the only newspaper on our doorstep that captures the full extent of how the media landscape has changed – and continues to change.
So, what’s happened with regional and local newspapers?
The simple answer to that question is times have changed. The relationship between information providers and consumers is now closer, more connected and more immediate, which has shifted business models, while evolving technology has had an impact on the investment decisions of media organisations. The pace of change has been noticeably rapid.
Allow me to share an anecdote to illustrate how times have changed.
As a football-mad youngster back in the 1960s, if you missed the Saturday football results on radio or TV, your next best bet was the evening sports paper. It had all the results on the front page, with the exception of those games that finished too late to be included.
Fast forward 30-plus years to the 1994 second division play-off final when Burnley faced Stockport County at Wembley. The game coincided with me flying off on holiday to Spain while the match played out. On landing, I was desperate to know the result, after all the winner was promoted to Division 1. But it was a devil of a job to discover and took me a good couple of hours until we arrived at the hotel. Thirty years later and very little had changed.
If that was to happen today, I’d know the result the minute I switched on my smartphone in the airport. Not just the result but everything else I might want to know about the game in minute detail. What we have today is information saturation. Whatever you want to know, wherever you want to know it, it is available at your fingertips (within reason, of course).
And that’s what has changed. The days of waiting for a newspaper to disseminate the news or making an appointment to view the teatime TV news, or listening to it on the radio, have long gone; to be replaced with instant information 24/7, 365 days a year.
1994 – not just the year Burnley got promoted!
It’s no secret the catalyst of this change is the worldwide web. Although 1983 is said to be the internet’s official birthday, 1994 has been hailed as the year the internet we all know, and love, was really born with Amazon and Yahoo gathering momentum. By mid-1994 there were 2,738 websites worldwide, according to Gray’s statistics on Wikipedia: increasing to more than 10,000 by the end of the year.
TV broadcasters in the UK had embarked on 24-hour programming six years earlier, although it wasn’t until 1997 that the BBC launched its 24-hour news channel – the first competitor for Sky News that had been running since 1989.
Today global internet users total 4.95 billion, with internet penetration standing at 62.5% of the world’s total population. The number of smartphone users in the world today is 6.648 billion, which translates to 83.32% of the world’s population owning a smartphone. In total, the number of people that own a smart and feature phone is 7.26 billion, making up 91.00% of the world’s population.*
The rise and rise of the internet saw a seismic shift of advertising – display, classified, recruitment and property – away from traditional print products to online platforms, robbing them of the ad revenues that were their lifeblood. Perhaps the best example of this shift is Exchange and Mart, once a weighty, weekly tome of display and classified advertising that ceased publishing as a print product in 2009 but remains online.
Since the web established itself in the lives of almost everyone on the planet, with the smartphone as a willing and able accomplice, the media landscape is unlikely to stand still.
Why is a ‘press release’ still important?
One of the favourite aspects of my job is telling a story. And when I’ve got a good one to share on behalf of a client, I am keen to send it to the most appropriate media outlets – and that includes regional and local media. Having digested what I said earlier, I wouldn’t blame you for asking why?
Just like everyone else in the world, news publishers nationally, provincially and locally are not blind to the benefits of having a digital presence in the worldwide web of information saturation.
But this is where the legacy of a newspaper’s past becomes its unique selling point. Newspaper brands are heritage brands. So, when you visit the MEN online – or substitute any news title you like – you are engaging with an organisation that has won the trust of its readers over many, many decades. And as anyone who knows anything about brands will tell you – that is priceless.
In effect, news organisations are doing what they’ve always done, they’re just doing it via different channels and using different tools and techniques. Readers’ letters were once seen as a gauge for engagement with any given title. Now, it’s comments. A great photo was, and still is, seen a great commodity for a newspaper, and its associated website. But now that can be embellished with video. Heritage doesn’t mean standing still.
It might be just as easy to know what’s going on in the Ukraine as it is to get news about your locality, but people love to know what’s going on on their doorstep and that has spawned another product of the changing media landscape – the hyperlocal newspaper and/or website. These are becoming more and more common and quite often can be found where a traditional local paper published by one of the big media groups has been scaled back or even closed down.
And finally…
Ofcom’s 2021/22 research into news consumption across television, radio, print, social media, podcasts, other websites/apps and magazines, known as the News Report, has just been published.
It examines the consumption of content, and attitudes towards that content, across different platforms. The aim of this report is to inform understanding of news consumption across all ages in the UK.
Here are some of its headline findings – some not so surprising:
- Different age groups consume news very differently; younger age groups are much more likely to use the internet and social media for news, whereas their older counterparts favour print, radio and TV.
- The reach of print/online newspapers has seen a decrease from 2020 (47%) to 2022 (38%). The decrease is driven by decreases in print (online newspaper reach remains steady) which have likely been exacerbated by the pandemic.
- Attitudes towards news generally remain consistent with 2020 (across measures such as quality, accuracy, trustworthiness and impartiality) for TV, radio, social media, newspapers and online, with TV performing strongest, and social media performing least well.
- TikTok’s reach for news has increased from 2020 (1%) to 2022 (7%). Half of its user base (for news) are aged 16-24.
- Five of the top six TV channels (including BBC One which remains the top news source across platforms) saw decreased reach from 2021 among online adults.
- Social media is overtaking traditional channels for news among teens. Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are now their top three most used sources for news. Meanwhile, many sources have seen decreases since 2021, with reach of BBC One/Two decreasing to 24% in 2022 (down from 35% in 2021).
As a final footnote of my own, the sports newspapers I speak of above is another thing of the past. The last remaining paper in the UK – The Pink, published by Portsmouth News – ceased publication in 2017, leaving just the Portsmouth Sports Mail as a weekend sports paper, which closed in July 2022.
(*Source: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world)
BIO: Our PR and copywriter, Nigel is somewhat of a media veteran. He has edited several weekly newspapers across Greater Manchester, going on to become editor-in-chief of what was then Guardian Media Group’s weekly newspapers in Tameside and south Manchester. He later became the editor of a daily newspaper in Belfast before returning home to lead the news team at Channel M, the now defunct TV station run by the Manchester Evening News, for five years.
More recently Nigel has worked in internal communications at the John Lewis Partnership, editing the retailer’s staff and business magazines and websites at its stores in Cheadle and Trafford before creating change and training communications for a nationwide roll out of a new customer ordering system.
Nigel has been a journalist since the days of typewriters (not even electric typewriters)! He has edited several weekly newspapers across Greater Manchester, been the editor-in-chief of several more and edited a daily newspaper in Northern Ireland. He came home to work on the former Greater Manchester regional TV station Channel M. Having dropped the […]
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