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 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 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 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 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 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 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 10^th 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!

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.

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.

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.

Our long-standing marketing relationship with a not-for-profit community organisation which helps Manchester residents with jobs, volunteering, training, and digital technology skills has yielded a new website created by our design, digital and web development team.

We were delighted when Yes Manchester – an award-winning registered charity working with people looking to improve their lives in some of north Manchester’s most deprived districts – asked us to design and create a brand-new website that would provide the services and functions residents, staff and stakeholders needed on their journey to find work, and to develop their careers and skills.

It also complies with the very latest legal and website standards and is easy to maintain, update and adapt in the future, as required.

Since 2013, Yes Manchester, which runs three centres in Newton Health, Collyhurst and Higher Blackley, has helped more than 1,000 north Manchester residents gain employment or launch their own business.

It has also helped more than 500 residents to gain formal training and over 8,000 with access to computer facilities and the internet. Overall, its three centres have received over 107,000 visits and its services have generated an estimated total social value of £15million.

We are no strangers to working with diverse public sector, not-for-profit and commercial organisations. Our Public sector clients include Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Recycle for Greater Manchester (R4GM), and North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust. Cornerstone also works with a wealth of community interest companies and registered charitable trusts.

The new website is fully compliant with legal requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and technology standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a global organisation which aims to develop the internet towards its best potential.

Yes Manchester was founded in 2013 as a subsidiary of Northwards Housing, a housing organisation which managed over 12,000 council homes across north Manchester. In July 2021 Northwards Housing became part of Manchester City Council and Yes Manchester become an independent CIC before becoming a registered charity in November of the same year.

Sheila Sturgeon, Chief Executive from Yes Manchester said: “As we embark on the next chapter of our journey, we felt a new website was needed. The old website had served us well but was built some time ago on a limited budget, with a basic design and coding to suit. Over time, it had become dated and limited.

“We needed a new website to serve our changing needs, to comply with the latest disability accessibility, internet, and data protection standards, and to provide range of new features. These include appointment-booking, interactive client profiles, the ability to receive donations and the ability to send automated messages to clients.

“Customers can now create their own profiles on the website with job preferences, skills, areas of interest, training, background and personal information. They can also upload their CVs for employers to see. Yes Manchester staff can analyse individual profiles and partner organisations, businesses and employers can engage with Yes Manchester on community projects, skills, training and job vacancy opportunities.”

When will Universal Analytics be deprecated?

Google says UA users will be able to access previously processed data for at least six months after each measurement solution is deprecated. In the meantime, it is encouraging users to export historical data and says it intends to offer more guidance on data export as the date approaches when UA will no longer be available.

However, Google isn’t giving a date when UA will no longer be available but says it will provide a ‘future date’ after which users will no longer be able to see their UA reports in the Analytics interface, or access UA data via the API.

Those who don’t make the switch face being left behind, although users will be able to use and collect data in their UA properties until 1st July 2023.

A raft of new business wins and five new recruits continues Cornerstone DM’s impressive growth and development as 2022 gets into full swing.

In fact, we are forecasting a sales growth of 30-40% for this year following our £1.2m turnover in 2021 – the agency’s best-ever performance, despite the economic impact of the Covid pandemic and the resulting national lockdowns.

We’ve started 2022 with a 30% growth in business that includes three new leisure trusts serving Bury, Barrow and Blackpool added to our impressive leisure centre marketing portfolio that already includes Active Tameside, Oldham Community Leisure, Everybody Sport & Recreation, GM Active, Volair and Burnley Leisure and Culture.

Other new clients include 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 to build, implement and support the adoption of a global workflow management system.

Exceptional standards and high-quality outputs

MD David Wadsworth, who founded the full-service agency in his parent’s attic in 2007, says: “We’re working with regional, national and international firms across a number of industries. 2022 has been an exceptional year for us so far, 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.”

These latest expansions follow a succession of new contracts we won in late 2021 that were already accelerating our recruitment and growth plans.

The new recruits have augmented our account management, digital and web teams, while a new sales manager to maximise the potential of the our signage operation is being sought.

In addition to our team of established professionals, we’ve taken on an apprentice in web development. The 12-month programme – with the possible option to extend to take higher qualifications – includes all the basics of HTML and CSS and further development into database managed websites using PHP.

Cornerstone Digital Signage Platform

Another new development for us is the launch of the Cornerstone Digital Signage Platform – a web-based, digital signage solution that allows businesses, brands and organisations to tailor their communications to their target audience via strategically positioned digital signage screens and totems.

We’ll be providing clients with total flexibility and autonomy over content, but we’ll align all output with a client’s marketing strategy and assist with asset creation – be it imagery or video to help engage with users, keep brand messaging front of mind and position key product messages throughout their facilities.

David adds: “We’ve developed this innovative, accessible and cost-effective digital signage software after listening to the market and what customers need and want. With so many clients embracing digital technology, and needing to communicate with stakeholders on their premises, we are confident of its effectiveness, and are offering a free, 30-day software trial, which can be used on any smart TV or wifi enabled digital signage solution.”

Cornerstone DM is thrilled and utterly chuffed to be announced as finalists for two accolades in this year’s Prolific North Marketing Awards!

We’ve been shortlisted in the Best Social Purpose Campaign category for our work on Active Tameside’s Charitable Status Campaign and in the Best Brand Building Campaign category for helping to steer the rebrand of Burnley Leisure.

The awards acknowledge the stand-out campaigns of the year alongside recognising the region’s best small and large agencies and in-house teams.

Formerly known as the Northern Marketing Awards, we’ll be alongside our regional agency and marketeer counterparts awaiting the winners’ announcements at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds on 25^th November.

In the running alongside campaigns for brands such as Asda, schuh, Channel 4 and The Body Shop, our Best Social Purpose Campaign submission centred on strengthening and defining Active Tameside’s position as a charitable organisation and social enterprise.

We developed a B2C marketing and PR strategy to shine a spotlight on the leisure trust’s transformative and award-winning community services and its dedication to provide outstanding leisure facilities to benefit and improve the borough’s health and wellbeing, particularly during and post lockdown.

The Best Brand Building Campaign nomination focussed on re-aligning Burnley Leisure & Culture’s popular, yet disparate, leisure centres, eating establishments, entertainment venues and community programmes into one recognisable brand while retaining the individuality and origins of each entity.

Cornerstone DM managing director David Wadsworth, who founded the agency in 2007 in his parent’s attic, just down the road from where it now occupies a modern, in-house designed office space said: “Being shortlisted in the Prolific North awards is a great achievement in itself for our agency.

“Our teams and clients have worked tirelessly and with great passion and pride to pull together each of these projects and deliver something that not only has value to the organisation, but also the people and communities they engage with.

“We’re proud of the brands and campaigns we’re a part of, and keen to see our work put forward. Well done to everyone involved in all categories, it’s great to see the industry thriving.”

Enjoying year-on-year growth and working with clients across a range of sectors and industries, we now employ a 22-strong team across strategic marketing, public relations, digital marketing, design, web development and print production.

You can keep in the loop with how we get on at the awards by following us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn where we’ll be posting live from the event on the 25^th!

As an Oldham agency born and bred, we were delighted to recently partner with The Rio Ferdinand Foundation (RFF) Oldham Enterprise Trust (OET) and Oldham Opportunity Area at an event designed to boost the aspirations and career prospects of young people from high schools across the borough.

Building on its existing work in Oldham, RFF and OET organised the Enterprise Day with event partner Oldham College, which provide the venue and catering for free.

It brought together local businesses and business leaders as part of a new initiative to help inspire, educate and connect young people through entrepreneurialism and enterprise skills.

Around 80 students from eight local schools including Waterhead Academy, The Blue Coat School, The Radclyffe School, North Chadderton School and Coop Academy Failsworth attended the careers event which featured interactive sessions, skills workshops and inspirational speakers from the Oldham community.

Keen to inspire, invest in and increase opportunities for the young people on our doorstep we were thrilled to be invited to take part, particularly considering the motivational and humble origins of our agency.

Fresh out of Huddersfield University with a degree in marketing, founder, managing director and Oldhamer David Wadsworth didn’t let his inexperience get in the way of his burning desire to launch his own agency.

In 2007 he laid those first foundations of Cornerstone – and all from his parent’s attic in Clarksfield, Oldham!

Fourteen years and several moves later we now occupy an impressive in-house designed and built office space in Acorn Street, Lees, employing a 22-strong team across strategic marketing, public relations, digital marketing, design, web development and print production and now have an annual turnover of over £1m.

Alongside highlighting David’s story of entrepreneurialism and determination to succeed, our ‘communication’ themed activity workshop at the enterprise event was delivered by PR manager Gill Potts and our 18-year-old digital marketing apprentice Madeline Thorp.

Madeline engaged students with her first-hand experience of gaining an apprenticeship and offered insightful advice on work experience, job applications and interviews.

“Gill and I delivered a workshop on behalf of Cornerstone DM that revolved around the theme of communication,” said Madeline.

“I spoke to the students about how to communicate to potential employers through CVs and interviews, and how there are other routes into the workplace aside from university.

“Inspiring more young people into work is something very important to me as an apprentice, and it was a pleasure to be able to talk to young people like myself about a more unconventional pathway into the workplace and how to actually secure an apprenticeship.

“The students really engaged with our workshop and activities, which was great to see.”

David added: “It was fantastic to be invited to work with the Rio Ferdinand Foundation to help inspire, encourage and guide our borough’s future workforce.

“Finding insights, mentorship and guidance from industry experts has been critical to my own success with Cornerstone, so it’s a great pleasure to be able to take part and support our community’s leaders and managers of tomorrow in achieving their path to success.

“The event was extremely well organised and well received by attendees, and it’s excellent to see this work taking place in our town.”

Victoria Lowe, RFF programme manager North West said: “The event was a huge success, our businesses and young entrepreneurs really inspired the young people who took part in their talks and enterprising activities.

“The young people learnt about communication, teamwork, resilience and problem-solving, as well as top tips and career guidance from our professionals, like Cornerstone.

“Everyone got stuck into the different workshops and young people created films to share their own enterprising ideas for Oldham.

“RFF would like to say a huge thank you to our partners Oldham Enterprise Trust, Youth Enterprise Network Oldham, Oldham College and our businesses for all of their support in this collaboration.”

The career opportunity programme is offering weekly sessions throughout this year with opportunities for local businesses, education practitioners and members of the community to get involved. If you want to support young people to tackle inequality and drive social change in your area visit the website Support our work — Rio Ferdinand Foundation or contact the Programme Manager, Victoria Lowe, on 0161 743 3779.

How well is your team? How well are your coworkers?
Do you really know?

If your team or colleagues are shut away in their back bedrooms, as many of us have been, or still are, following the shift to home working, the honest answer is that it’s hard to know.

I started to think about this in a room full of 30-40 people at a LFX Live event – the first in-person event this leisure and fitness network, which we at Cornerstone sponsor, has held since the pandemic struck.

Dr Glenda Rivoallen was one of four speakers – me included – at the event held at Prairie Sports Village, run by Burnley Leisure and Culture, one of Cornerstone’s clients.

Dr Rivoallen was speaking about leadership and resilience in the workplace – a key topic in these difficult times amid the ever-increasing focus on mental health, wellbeing and mindfulness.

How well are you as an individual, she asked? Is it time to be more human and not put on a façade of everything is OK when it’s not?

How can you find a positive way to engage with your teams about their mental wellbeing, their happiness at work and their engagement with your culture?

Not easy questions to answer for anyone with a remote workforce.

And just to prove how difficult it is to really know how someone is feeling, Dr Rivoallen, speaker, author, entrepreneur and consultant in creating successful wellness brands, said she classed herself as having high functioning anxiety. She is a brilliant speaker, confident in her approach. You would never believe she had anything like that underpinning who and what she is.

She spoke about the benefits of mindfulness and focusing more on your own wellbeing, and the benefits that exercise can have on your mental wellbeing as well as your physical wellbeing.

I’m certainly interested to find out more about how we can better ensure our company is a healthy place with resilient team members.

What is the Facebook boost button used for?

The Facebook boost button is used for promoting organic content to a wider audience.

You do this by paying to ‘boost’ one of your regular posts to an audience defined by location, age, gender, interests and/or behaviours. This makes it quick and easy to get your page content in front of users who don’t yet ‘like’ your business profile.

But when we compare the simple boost button to the Facebook Ads platform, we start to see its limitations.

What Facebook Ads allow us to do that boosted posts do not, includes specifying ad placements, objectives, and using advanced creative and targeting capabilities.

Ad objectives

Do you want your content to generate real results rather than just increasing your social reach?

Facebook Ads allow you to choose from different ad objectives based on what you want to achieve.

If you want more people to buy from you or complete a key conversion, choosing the ‘conversion’ ad objective will mean your budget is being spent per conversion, rather than per ad view or click. Ad objectives help you to spend your budget wisely to get the best results.

There are several ad objectives you can choose from, other than conversions, including:

Brand awareness

• Increase awareness of your business or Facebook page

Reach

• Show your ads to as many people as possible within your defined audience

Web traffic

• Drive users to click through to your website

Engagement

• Encourage more likes, shares, and comments on your ad content

App installs

• Increase downloads of your app

Video views

• Get as many video views as you can

Lead generation

• Collect leads via in-Facebook forms

Facebook messages

• Connect with people on Facebook by encouraging them to message your Facebook page directly

Catalogue sales

• Showcase your e-commerce store products and increase sales

Store visits

• Increase visits to your physical shop

So, are Facebook Ads or the boost button best?

There are advantages to using both forms of Facebook Advertising, but it all depends on what you want to achieve.

There is certainly more cause to use Facebook Ads with its wide range of objective targeting and creative freedom allowing you to get more out of your money. But the Facebook boost button does offer you a quick and easy way to promote your content and get a specific message out to your target audience without having to worry too much about ad setup.

What does an SEO audit involve?

Tech specs within an SEO audit look at the core technical elements of your website which affect crawlability, indexing, and performance. We run simple yes/no, good/bad, active/inactive reports on these checks and communicate any substantial issues thereafter.

Core web vitals became direct ranking factors in 2021 and are the most recent must-check item for your SEO audits. Ensuring your website passes all core web vitals checks will improve usability as well as rankings.

Running a site health audit using one of the many SEO software programmes on the market allows you to understand and prioritise recurring errors on site such as missing alt text, duplicate content, broken internal links and more.

Auditing site architecture will allow you to understand exactly how the site is structured and what improvements you need to make to increase your crawl budget and improve user journey.

Reviewing site content also allows you to see where there may be gaps in content, missing content, or light content on site.

How your website currently ranks with the SERP is an important consideration to make within your SEO audit as it will allow you to make a gap analysis against your competitors, highlighting your ranking strengths and weaknesses.

Backlink audits underline any potential toxic domains that link to your website and show you where exactly your backlink value comes from.

Understandably, Google is starting to hold user experience in higher and higher regard when it comes to search rankings.

What’s next?

Once you’ve crawled your site, run your checks and populated your audit document, it’s time to give it some value.

Start to review all of your audit outcomes and combine them into a prioritisation list. Decide on how you’re going to prioritise each point (we use a low, medium, high traffic light system) and finalise your audit with a realistic and timely list of actions you’re going to take to improve organic search visibility.

What about PHP 8?

PHP 8 – launched in November 2020 – is a pretty hefty update as updates go.

Positively packed with new features, functions and performance improvements – including union types, JIT (just in time), the nullsafe operator, named arguments, non-capturing catches – in other words an awful lot of coding language designed to make PHP more efficient and reliable.

While that’s not for us to worry about with a screen side view, those grafting away at the back end of website development are particularly overjoyed as it gifts them the pot of gold – the tools to write well-structured code.

The new features

Attributes

One of the most debated new features in PHP 8 is attributes, also known as “annotations”.

Attributes replace the docblocks metadata storage declaring metadata for classes, methods, functions, and arguments. Now, attributes can be declared with Syntax #[…].

Fallthrough

If a switch statement doesn’t have a break after each case, it will run to the next case, even if the intention was for the code to break. This allowed switch functions to execute several blocks of code in sequence but was the cause of many bugs.

Match (explained below) enforces an break after each arm and multiple conditions can be commanded with commas separating conditions.

JIT compiler

When PHP is run, it’s assembled into virtual instructions that are executed in a virtual machine. JIT changes this by assembling the code into x86 machine code and then running that code directly on the CPU. This will improve performance on applications that rely heavily on mathematical functions but won’t make much difference for your average web apps.

Match Expressions

Match Expressions intend to solve problems in Switch functionality.

Switch used a type-converting relational operator (==), which often caused bugs. Now, independent of strict_types, Match uses a strict comparison operator (===).

Mixed Types

In recent versions of PHP, it was possible to declare the expected type of input and return data. However, PHP did not always support Types, and this is a problem. In some cases, a Type was omitted or simply forgotten. MixedTypes now tries to solve this problem.

Named Arguments

Named arguments offer more flexibility when calling functions. Instead of calling a function and passing each argument in the order specified by the function, named arguments define a name for each parameter and can be called out of order.

Static Return Type

“The static special class name in PHP refers to the class a method was actually called on, even if the method is inherited. This is known as “late static binding” (LSB). This RFC proposes to make static also usable as a return type (next to the already usable self and parent types).”*

Static can’t be used as part of a parameter in this case, and refers to the class that was called.

Throw expressions

Throw statements are now expressions, enabling it to return a value. This makes throw usable in a wider spectrum of scenarios.

Union Types

Union types announce the type of value expected from an input (schema in some other languages). It’s defined by using a pipe | or pre-defined classes.

What does 5G mean for your website?

Now the 5G infrastructure is well on its way, it’s important to understand what it signals for you, not just in the near-future but also the here and now – the transitional period leading up to full roll out.

The major changes in network and devices will have a knock-on effect on websites for the better, making the current gap between PC and mobile content pretty much non-existent.

5G’s faster speeds will be the perfect platform to support video and audio rich content, vastly enhancing the user experience.

Coupled with stable connections and even wider coverage it will be easier to stay connected, drawing in more and more people to your website via mobile devices.

Mobile apps will be much easier to develop, giving them increased features and functionality to again upgrade user experience, even for those in dense and remote areas.

How can you use the benefits of 5G on your website?

As video rich content will be key for the emerging 5G audience, investment in this area will be essential.

Superfast speeds will eliminate slow-down and glitching, instead presenting opportunities for brands and businesses to engage and convert more users than ever before.

5G is set to see off the user experience difference between PC and mobile content, optimising websites to cater for customers on the go much more easily.

It’s also expected to fuel on-site demand for AR and VR customer experiences.

This has already begun to some extent but with advances in technology we’re now seeing an increase in the use of 3D videos placed into websites and AR apps on product pages opening up the opportunities to create immersive user experiences.

5G also brings a host of security capabilities thanks to increased bandwidth which will make it easier to reliably handle sensitive data.

All these benefits point to one thing: a huge, anticipated surge in the number of users browsing online via their mobile devices.

So now is the time to think ahead to ensure your website is mobile web design friendly, bursting with UX crowd-pleasers and highly functioning on all levels, especially when it comes e-commerce systems.

With the right knowledge you’ll be able to prepare for a formidable 5G future, one that not only looks like changing the world but can also transform your business too.

If you’d like to speak to our expert team about super-charging your website for a fast and furious 5G future, get in touch with us today by calling 0161 213 9941 or emailing us at: clients@cornerstonedm.co.uk

Formalising the strategy

Once you have all your ideas written down, it’s time to formalise it. This will become the document that you work from and refer to constantly over the next 12 months so let’s jump right in:

Firstly, create a table or excel document that is split out by months and marketing channels (social media marketing, email marketing, PR, PPC etc.)

Then plan out the campaigns, events and offers you’ve written down within this document.

To take your leisure strategy to the next level, consider:

Colour coding

Organising information by colour groups helps you to easily identify key information and group different content within one campaign.

Setting KPIs

Projecting the results you want to achieve and noting these within your strategy planning document will help you to benchmark if things are working or to prove ROI to your exec team.

A six month review

At the six month stage, review all of your activity and cross reference it with targets you originally set in your planner document – how do they compare? Has your activity been successful?

If not, think about how you could do things differently and adjust your strategy for the following six months.

Reporting quarterly

If your exec team expects regular updates, or if you’d prefer regular performance checks to keep yourself on track, consider producing a quarterly report that highlights key achievements and areas for improvement.

There are lots of free reporting tools that you can access to help you with this process.

On Tuesday 29th July, David, our Managing Director spoke with Ian Wolstenholme from Oldham Community Radio about all things marketing and media related including discussion about our new HQ and marketing during a pandemic.