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Our strategic approach to engaging with hard to reach audiences enables you to move closer to your short, and longer term goals to drive business growth, improve communications, support sales and introduce you to new and creative ways of working. Whether it be streamlining the customer user journey on your website or helping you to gain deep insight into where, and how the hard to reach audiences are engaging in their everyday lives.
Our team of experienced strategists host a discovery session; understand your requirements and take your objectives on board. The team then thoroughly evaluate the market and explore user journeys and customer experiences to streamline set measures of success. We’ll create a plan of action for you, looking at a range of channels that perhaps you haven’t explored before for your goals to be accomplished.
With a plan in place for communicating with these audiences, we then have an expert team of creatives and digital developers at hand to turn the plan into reality. Running an event in the community, a creative social media campaign, a thoughtful door drop, a digital solution or out of home media buying, could all be the answer you’re looking for. Watching it come to life and get results is always the best part!
How can we help you with hard to reach audiences?
Whether it’s communicating with your vulnerable customers to increase brand awareness, launching new initiatives or educating on the importance of winter safety, a targeted campaign means we can take the time to create a strategy tailored to your target audience’s and business objectives. Following the strategy we see it all come to life with creative concepts, always referring back to the objectives and measures of success.
A social media campaign can contain a series of coordinated activities aimed at achieving a specific goal over a set period of time, with outcomes that can be tracked and measured. Profiling your target audience means we can choose which social media channels will work best and use these to your advantage.
Good strategy underpins all successful digital marketing. Using data in an insightful way and by understanding how to get the most revenue and return from your marketing budget, we can focus on reducing underperformance and ensure you’re reaching your consumers in an innovative way with channel optimisation. We can help you see trends that may have been overlooked and help you create new ideas and widen your reach.
Hard to reach audiences can be those in the most remote locations and therefore, access to wifi and the digital world is sometimes limited. For this segmentation, taking your brand message right to their doorstep can be the most effective way to communicate. We plan, design, run and manage out of home activity through effective media buy and community engagement event management.
We support you in strengthening your customer’s emotional investment in your brand, making it easier for them to engage with you and provide you with the tools you need to encourage PSR registrations. Our process can be applied and adapted to a multitude of engagement challenges you may face, including those set out by the regulator.
Our range of clients within the utilities sector, means we’ve heard of most of the issues you can face when it comes to effectively engaging with your consumers, and driving PSR registration. We’re here to help you understand and communicate what consumers perceive eligibility to look like and how that isn’t always the case. We carefully consider tone of voice and tap into wider audiences such as neighbours, friends and family who can also help to encourage PSR sign up.
How can we help you with effective audience engagement?
Whether this is communicating with your vulnerable customers via traditional marketing methods or using new technologies, a targeted campaign means we can take the time to create a strategy tailored to your target audience’s and business objectives. Following the strategy we see it all come to life with creative concepts, always referring back to the objectives and measures of success.
As increasing sign ups to PSR is not only beneficial to your business for your customers, but also putting a tick in the box for regulatory targets, it is prevalent that no stone is left unturned when thinking about ways to engage. Leave the stone un-turning to us as we help delve deep into the hearts and minds of, not only PSR customers themselves, but friends, families and neighbours of PSR customers to drive engagement to its full potential.
Providing you with a strategy and ideas for engaging with your audiences is only part of the journey with Blumilk; we like to see it through. We have an in house team of designers, animators, illustrators, photographers, storytellers and developers to help your communication come to life and reach the required audience.
From business plans and strategic direction statements, to gender pay gap reports and sustainability strategies, we’ve brought new dynamic ways of approaching corporate reporting to a range of our utility clients.
Working with a wide range of clients within the sector, we understand the pressures and importance of immovable tight deadlines set by the regulator. We work with you as an extension of your team so everything is smooth running while removing that unnecessary pressure knowing everything is in capable hands.
Whether the audience is the customer, stakeholder or the regulator, we work with you to ensure the right solution is the most effective solution; the message may be the same, but the communication channel and the language tone are very different.
How can we help you with corporate and regulatory reporting?
We approach your corporate report with its purpose at the forefront of our minds and will ask questions to make sure you get the most effective results. Having worked in the sector for many years, we understand the tight, non-movable deadlines given by regulators, sometimes with specific pagination requirements and we have streamlined processes in place to ensure everything goes to plan.
We have dedicated Account Managers who will work with your team to ensure that all of your projects with Blumilk run smoothly; we agree a timeline with you upfront, send weekly status reports to keep you up to date with progress, highlight upcoming dates for content and amendments and are generally there to make your life easier. Our experienced project management team understands how the utilities industry works and can therefore guide you through the creative process allowing you to focus in house.
We have long lasting relationships with experienced printers and can manage the printing of any of your corporate documentation, recommending papers and finishes dependant on budget, purpose and the type of finish required.
Successful brand development that will secure your marketing positioning and stand the test of time, needs a lot more than just a great logo.
We look at your brand as a whole, from brand proposition and how want your customers to perceive you, to shaping the personality of your brand ensuring everything comes together seamlessly.
The elements making up your brand come in many different forms, from your logo mark, naming your business or a new department, product or innovation, strap line, written narratives, your purpose and values, your brand story, your brand tone – and it all needs to be engaging, relevant and understandable.
The Blumilk team will work with you to determine how your business stands above others in your space and how this can be communicated. We’ll bring the brand to life, capturing insight from your consumers and motivating your colleagues to come together for the cause.
How can we help you to develop your brand?
We have helped our clients in the utilities sector to re-brand, rejuvenate and reposition established brands, and have created sub-brands for projects, collaborations and events.
At Blumilk, we allocate a brand guardian to all of our clients, the guardian comes in the form of one of our senior design team members and they personally ensure everything that is worked on using your brand is visually correct to your brand guidelines. This guarantees that your brand is consistent across all platforms, and to all audiences.
Building a great brand takes more than just your logo and we create a strategy to manage the ongoing roll out of your brand. By understanding your market space and your business, we can plan ahead considering future goals and objectives. This can encompass ensuring you have a consistent brand voice throughout all of your communication across all of your platforms and to all of your audiences.
A strong brand proposition enables you to communicate everything your brand delivers. Whether you’re using internal communications to engage, inform and motivate your team or an online social campaign to promote your priority services register, your brand should be clearly identifiable. The golden thread that runs through everything you do at every touchpoint should be evident.
Read about our partners at CCW and how we worked with them for a total rebrand last year here.
Keeping your brand consistent in a large corporate firm can come with its own challenges; staff using old logos, pulling them from Google when creating presentations and changing the colours to match in with what they’re doing. We recommend brand guidelines to all of our partners, ensuring everyone is singing from the same sheet – and for those of you that need to tighten this even further, we created Brandkeeper.
Brandkeeper is the cloud based software solution that lets you take control of brand consistency and store brand assets and guidelines in one central place. Brandkeeper takes your project approval to a new level with only a couple of clicks.
Blumilk can support you with a range of ways of engaging your staff and improving internal communications in general, as well as guiding you in recruitment with the creation of your employer value proposition.
We’ve hosted launch events for our clients both internally and externally, ensuring everyone is on board with the new brand, what it means for your company, and how it will be used.
We’ve also worked with a client recently in launching new team into the business, clearly explaining the benefits of the new team, what they’d be doing day to day and how to contact them all via a friendly, interactive and informative animation that was sent to all staff.
How can we help you with internal communications?
Inform, inspire and connect. By creating an internal communications strategy everyone in the company is on the same page; management have agreed to how they will interact with staff from general day to day updates to how big announcements will be made. Colleagues appreciate consistency and a level of trust is created.
Perhaps you receive a multitude of job applications but no one quite has the expertise you were hoping for, or maybe there are company perceptions already made regarding your business. We work with clients who are looking to attract a more diverse workforce and appeal to particular demographics who hadn’t considered the available roles within the industry. Blumilk can support you in recruitment campaigns across social media and other platforms and help to position you as the number one desired employer in your sector or location.
Information security can be an issue for many of our clients in the utility industry; with a large staff in a range of locations, data to be kept secure and a whole IT system to protect, we understand the vitality of ensuring staff all understand the severity of cyber security. We have worked with clients including Northern Powergrid and SSEN to create internal communication campaigns to effectively educate and keep conversations flowing about what to look out for, and how to take precautions.
With targets set by regulators and your approach to environmental targets needing to be read by stakeholders and often customers, we understand the need for new ideas and approaches to not only make the project engaging and informative, but to also run smoothly and quickly with deadlines often tight.
How can we help you to demonstrate your approach to achieving environmental targets?
When demonstrating your approach to environmental targets, sometimes you need to consider the environmental impact of your campaign or document and this can be as simple as ensuring you’re using recycled paper and environmentally friendly inks when printing. However more recently, we ask you to consider whether your document needs to be traditionally printed at all and would it be more beneficial for your stakeholders and customers to have a digital solution in its place.
It may be that your campaign or project requires its own micro-website that hosts subject knowledge, downloadable documentation and could feature interactive elements including games. Websites are simple for Blumilk to set up for you, and often more cost effective than you might think – and it also means you can update the information regularly as a project progresses, update statistics or update your audience.
Another simple option could be to consider an interactive PDF with hyperlinks and clickable contents making life easier for your stakeholders and helping to save the planet with lower printing requirements.
Planning a targeted campaign means we can take the time to create a strategy tailored to your audiences and business objectives. Whether this is how you encourage your customers to ‘Save 10 Litres A Day‘ with Affinity Water or launching a new initiative in your business such as Northern Powergrid’s Silent Power – we have experience in writing strategies to encourage behaviour change and interaction in a multitude of environmental issues.
Following the strategy we see it all come to life with creative concepts and the running of the campaign, always referring back to the objectives and measures of success.
Experiential marketing, which is often referred to as ‘engagement marketing’ or ‘on the ground marketing’, is a way of marketing that invites an audience to interact with a business in a real-world situation. Using participatory, hands-on, and tangible branding material, the business can show its customers not just what the company offers, but what it stands for; which is great when it comes to encouraging behaviour change towards environmental issues.
Our experimental and event marketing includes:
A social media campaign can contain a series of coordinated activities aimed at achieving a specific goal over a set period of time, with outcomes that can be tracked and measured which can be a perfect solution for encouraging customers to engage in your environmental initiatives. Profiling your target audience means we can choose which social media channels will work best and use these to your advantage, ensuring you engage with your desired audiences.
We can provide you with the strategy, the messaging, the final artwork; whether this be a series of images, or even an animation explaining your subject and ensure you have a consistent tone of voice throughout the communications, reporting on campaign progress and results weekly.
When you’re dealing with a complex idea, product or problem, trying to explain it solely in text form can be very challenging. Depending on the how the copy is written and how technical it is, the audience may or may not connect and engage with it, which is why animation can be the perfect solution for your environmental initiative, engaging customers and stakeholders in a concise, easy to follow format. Read more about why an animation might be perfect for your next project here.
Creating a sub-brand for a collaboration, initiative or project means it is given its own identity and is therefore recognised on all platforms whether this be rolled out on social media, television, in print, in display ads and it doesn’t always rely on having your company brand there to support it. This can be great for building traction behind your environmental initiatives as customers and stakeholders begin to interact with the sub brand and what its stands for.
An excellent digital offering can usually be improved by simply taking the time to step back and consider how your customers and stakeholders use your website and what they want from it. Our team use tested methods to research user journeys and current user experiences on your website and can advise and implement simple changes to improve and transform your website, with the goal of each user journey at the centre.
Digital offerings aren’t just limited to your external website and transforming internal software and systems can make a huge change in productivity and communication throughout the business.
It’s also worth considering whether the documents you create need to be a printed format; would an interactive PDF that a user can download straight from your website be better for their experience and the environment?
How can we help you with your digital offering?
Many of our clients approach us looking for a new digital solution on their website after having their current website for many years. We use Google Analytics and specialist UX research to see how your customers use your current website, looking at what can be streamlined, combined and ultimately what we can do to make your website easier to use and therefore provide a better overall experience.
Our team of in house digital designers have many years of website design experience and constantly review latest UX trends providing you with the best solution for your digital offering. Our designers consider customer journeys on your website, designing with a mobile-first approach, where appropriate, creating designs that will hold the test of time over the coming years.
We design in a three step approach; a scoping session where we gather knowledge about your current website, who it’s used for and what your objectives are, the design stage, and the refinement stage.
Many of our clients approach us looking for a new digital solution on their website after having a website for many years, perhaps that they’ve struggled to maintain, sometimes due to tight restrictions with what’s possible without needing an agency to make every change, which ultimately, ends up costing your company a lot. We build all of our websites with you and your customers at the centre; building on a WordPress platform which enables you to have control of everything you need to update and more flexibility in the pages you created, with full training included in our costs. We also offer retainer packages for those that feel they will require us to be more involved once a website is live.
Utility companies around the UK provide services that are key to keeping the way we live moving. Whether you’re a gas distributor that needs to communicate the importance of gas safety to your local area, an electricity distributor that is looking to ensure people know what number to call in the event of a powercut (105 in case you were wondering!), or even a water supplier that want customers to be able to quickly access billing information, the key to ensuring the information can be found quickly on Google is via search engine optimisation. We can help by with teaching you and your staff SEO best practice, undertaking SEO audits so you can see where improvements can be made and by implementing our findings to ensure you can be found.
Working with our current clients we’ve been supporting them with suggestions for alternatives ways of working both online and offline to support and streamline in both cost and time efficiencies. Recently, this has included creating a company specific app that gives all employees access to an online portal via their devices when out in the field as opposed to having to fill in loads of manual paperwork in their vans and once they’ve completed jobs.
Blumilk can support our utility sector clients by introducing and recommending new innovations and technologies to ensure they keep up with customer demand and infrastructure, and adapting new ways of working internally to ensure the smooth processes and a happy, up to date team.
How can we help you with communicating your business transformation, innovation and efficiency?
Customers engage with authentic brands who are transparent in the work they do. Introducing principles and promises can be an effective way of communicating your values to your customers and stakeholders as well as internally to staff as part of your business transformation. For example, we have recently worked with Northern Powergrid to communicate its customer promises via a series of posters, clearly demonstrating their promise to keep customers ‘always informed’ and ‘always valued’ and as a company ‘always trusted’ and ‘always caring’.
Traditional ways of working including paperwork to fill in when out and about can be time consuming, easy to misinterpret, open for error, and often misplaced. Considering web based solutions can streamline your processes, making life easier for your staff, and ultimately providing better, all round service. Blumilk can create bespoke solutions to suit your internal needs, including websites and web based apps, taking you from a fact finding session through to deployment and online support.
Blumilk can support you in a range of ways of engaging your staff and improving internal communications in general, as well as helping you to onboard your staff into the business and new initiatives.
We’ve hosted brand launch events for our clients both internally and externally, ensuring everyone is on board with the new brand, understands what it means for the company, and how it will be used.
We’ve recently supported a client in launching new team into the business, clearly explaining the benefits of the new team, what they’d be doing day to day and how to contact them all via a friendly, interactive and informative animation that was sent to all staff.
Blumilk can support you with colleague onboarding and from an internal communications perspective to help senior managers and decision-makers inform all staff about business transformation and/or help them to implement changes and updates, or gather feedback by facilitating a presentation, workshop or event.