The cold dark mornings are fading, Covid-19 news takes a backseat, and “Green Washing” is a growing term that brands, and marketers alike, are terrified of. But what’s happened at Millrace? Here are the best bits of our first quarter in 2022:
Putting our marketing where our mouth is.
We claim to produce meaningful marketing content, but how has that looked in the first part of 2022? We work in a pretty fierce industry, but sass and finger snapping is not where we are at. We strive to use marketing for the “good” – supporting campaigns that improve people’s lives or help make the planet a better place, and Q1 hasn’t failed to disappoint.
Housing.
It’s been quite the quarter for our housing work. We kicked off January with a healthy dose of conference support at Community Housing Cymru’s annual “Reputation and Relationship” conference. Millrace Director, Laura, ran a popular social media workshop helping Housing communication teams across Wales understand the power and value social activity can have to building relationships, understanding tenant needs, and building a brand.
We’ve learnt that Housing teams are busy, and we mean really busy (hashtag Comms Heroes). They are pulled in lots of changeable directions, often adapting to the needs of multiple projects, legislation updates, and tenant needs. As a result, social media activity is often one of the first areas to be neglected, but we are on a mission to change this. Social media is an excellent platform for the Housing sector to utilise to keep stakeholders informed, build relationships, and market their organisations ongoing good work. In Q1, we took on two social media research and analysis projects for two Welsh Housing Associations with the aim of:
- understanding how and where their audiences were engaging most
- building a future proof content calendar that suits their ongoing activity needs
- producing a series of designs and motion graphics to support engagement aims
Here’s a snippet from one of the projects for Linc Cymru:
Going Green(er)
The whole world is looking to go greener. Whether that’s by choice or consumer pressure, green is the new black. Business Wales launched a “Resource Efficiency Campaign” designed to work with businesses to improve their knowledge and understanding of resource efficiency, encouraging them to take action to mitigate their impact on climate change to achieve the Welsh Government ambition towards net zero economy and how to undertake such changes.
Communicating to varying business sectors all over Wales is not for the fainthearted. It’s taken a lot of effort from Government, business delivery, and agencies up and down the country. For Millrace, we were asked to focus on a few key content areas:
- promoting a weeklong workshop event where businesses were able to find out about how they can become more sustainable
- content planning and production of social media posts, and motion graphics, that explains how Wales is supporting businesses become more sustainable
- write blog pieces that capture business owners asking questions such as “how can my business become more sustainable?”
content is spelt m-o-t-i-o-n
We are all fighting for people’s attention, and it’s increasingly more difficult because our attention span is getting worse. In 2015, it was reported humans have an 8 second attention span compared to 12 seconds in 2000. Woah.
Brands are all fighting the same digital battle for attention, and we’ve noticed a surge in motion graphics becoming the norm for social media campaigns. Between January and March, we’ve created 28 motion graphics (graphics that move…). Some short (3-5 seconds) some long (over 1 minute). Motion graphics do out-perform static posts, so for the stat lovers it’s an obvious choice to add into the marketing mix. Back in 2018 Twitter reported a 55% increase in engagement on the platform when Tweets included motion (gif).
Fast forward 4 years and we bet that stat has been blown out the (moving) water.
growing the team.
Two years ago, Millrace was a team of 1. Fast forward to April 2022 and we are now a team of 5, with 2 more recruits set to join the Mill in May. We’ve stuck to our guns, living and breathing the business value “we deliver creative content marketing and content marketing only”.
Thanks for believing in us. We are going to need a bigger boat.
We like a chat so if you have any questions, or just fancy saying hey, contact us on 02922 801280 or email hello@millracemarketing.co.uk
