Cover stars, OnBrand, Celebrate 12 years

OnBrand: 12 Years Old, 125+ Years Of Experience

OnBrand, the St Albans-based marketing and business growth agency, has just celebrated 12 years at the coal face of helping businesses achieve their goals. Managing Director and founder Daniel Graham refl ects on 12 years in business and the top 3 things businesses need to do to be ready for 2022.

Over 12 years, OnBrand has worked with countless businesses from varied industries. As a full-service marketing and business growth agency, we fi nd ourselves entering companies at crucial tipping points. Those points could be anything from a small business trying to move beyond a vibrant presence on Instagram and into full e-commerce, or a large business looking for some expert eyes to help them improve their website’s customer journey.

This means we occupy a privileged position of trust – but that trust doesn’t come overnight. It comes from ensuring we stay ahead of the curve and put our experience to good use. And that’s what this article is all about. 2022 is a critical turning point for UK businesses. The world is opening up again, business and consumer optimism needs justifying, which is why we’re telling businesses to do (at least) these 3 things to get themselves ready: sort their website, start using customer reviews properly and to be the expert!

Own Your Digital Shopfront

If you’ve built your business on a thirdparty platform, your business is in a constant state of risk. For example, when the paid-content site OnlyFans said they were banning certain types of monetised content on their site (mainly the adult content), it wasn’t just adult content businesses that were concerned. Overnight, OnlyFans was changing its mind about the type of content it would allow people to host, seemingly on a whim. Eventually, OnlyFans was forced to row back the decision following massive user backlash.

It was a PR nightmare for OnlyFans, but the debacle showed how dangerous it is to base your income entirely on a thirdparty site – your income can be wiped out overnight if the site changes its guidelines or terms of use.

The same situation can arise if you’re a business that sells on one site – think eBay, Facebook Marketplace, or Etsy. It can also happen if you’re only using one particular social media platform to grow awareness of your brand. If the social media platform ‘does a MySpace’ and disappears, or ceases to be widely used, you’re in trouble.

If you run a digital business, it is therefore a huge benefi t to own the platform responsible for bringing in the money. That’s why we always recommend businesses have their own website rather than relying on third-party web builders – if their systems go down, so do yours.

Use Customer Reviews Properly

People buy from people – whether that’s directly or through recommendations. If your business isn’t using customer reviews in your marketing, you’re missing a trick. Customer reviews are strong marketing assets and if you’re not using them, you should be. We use our case studies all the time, because they help us sell our services purely by demonstrating we know what we’re doing.

Good reviews are always the best (obviously!), but negative reviews are just as useful because they give you insights into where your business could be frustrating customers. Bad or good, they serve a purpose, but it’s making sure you use them in the right way. For example, don’t knee-jerk a fi x to your business based on one bad review, be measured in your approach.

We’re helping more and more businesses understand the power of their reviews and encouraging them to use them on every channel their business communicates with customers. They should be pushed on social media, used as sale-closing conversion tools, sent to potential customers in your CRM journey, and they should be easy to fi nd on your website. When you ask for advice, most of us want it from an expert – we want to know that the person we’re trusting for input in our life knows what they’re talking about. Choosing to work with a company or buy a product is exactly the same thing – most people will choose to go with the brand they know or have heard about.

Google’s new algorithm for serving content to people is called EAT. It stands for Expertise, Authority, Trust and is key determinator in whether or not your content will appear in search results. The companies that work to build themselves a reputation as experts – through the use of content (written or otherwise) on their sites and social media feeds.

Optimising your site content to answer customer questions makes you look like an expert – to Google and to the people asking the questions. What company wouldn’t want to be seen as a trusted authority in its marketplace by the people it wants to work with?

Head to www.onbrand.co.uk for more information on the many ways OnBrand could help you get 2022-ready.