Celebrating 6 years in business

collabmedia 13 May 2022

12.05.16
It seems crazy to write this: Collab Media is celebrating its 6-year anniversary.

They do say time flies when you’re having fun!

Right at the beginning of our story, imagine a 19-year-old undergraduate completing her final dissertation and thinking about what direction her life was going to go once she’d graduated from university. Flash forward 6 years and we’re here!

How it started: In 2016, our founder Ellie Rees set up Collab Media after a number of local businesses approached her for social media support following on from her recent success as a social influencer and blogger. The goal from the beginning was to support businesses within the North East through digital marketing. As social media developed, we saw a demand to help businesses with their digital marketing not only locally, nationally but also internationally and have been fortunate to work with businesses across the globe with their social media.

While our services grew and developed into branding and social media training & workshops, the core of our business has always reminded the same and that is social media marketing, which will always stay at the forefront of our brand.

How we celebrated our birthday: At Collab Media, we take celebrating birthdays very seriously. Cards, songs, cakes, decorations, the whole shebang. It’s a huge part of our culture and we wouldn’t change it for the world. Celebrating 6 years of business wasn’t going to get left in the shadows. We also spent the day reflecting on our achievements as a company. Some of these highlights include:

🔘Our Founded was shortlisted for an ‘Inspiring Others’ Tees Businesswomen award 2019.
🔘Ellie was also a Finalist at the Digital Women awards 2021.
🔘Collab Media runs an undergraduate module at Teesside University covering Social Media
🔘Moved into our first office which has since been expanded.
🔘Ellie became a proud trustee for Sprouts Community Food Charity.
🔘The company was recognised for exceptional work during covid by Entrepreneurs’ Forum.
🔘We’ve had stands & guest spoke at several Expos across the North East.
🔘Raised £6000 for food banks in Teesside.
🔘Spoke in several schools and colleges discussing social media and online bullying.
🔘Hosted 16 successful women in business networking events and grown Women in Collaboration.

Our Growth: 2020 was undoubtedly the most challenging year for us as a business, we lost 70% of our customer base overnight as our core customers at the time were within hospitality. We were fortunate enough to have vast experience within other sectors, so we quickly recovered and were able to adapt client’s marketing strategies to suit the current climate.

2020 although challenging at times, it was also the most rewarding. Most businesses were adapting to working from home, yet we’d made the big step to move into our first office space and leave remove working behind.

The present future: Our journey doesn’t stop there! 2022 has been a fantastic year so far; we completed our office expansion, with plans for the future to further expand so we can make space for more Collab team members.

Our team range from content creator, social media marketing specialist, and communications manager, we’re also connected to videographers, photographers, social media influencers, web developers, copywriters & PR specialists – we can reach out and bring in exactly the skills and talents our clients may need.

Here’s to Many More Years of Collab Media:
As always, we are so excited for the future of our company. We love helping our current clients grow and can’t wait to build new relationships with more hard-working business owners. Thank you for having helped us become what we are today. We hope we’ll be up to your expectations for another 6 years!

Collab Media X This is Union Collaboration

collabmedia 23 February 2022

We are thrilled to announce we are collaborating with the fantastic web design agency ‘This is Union’ enabling Collab Media to expand the digital offering to our current & future customers.

In the past couple of weeks, we have been working intensely on a long-term strategic partnership with ‘This is Union’. This collaboration is designed to grow both company’s ability to deliver better products & services to our clients.

This Is Union is an award-winning Worcester based agency with a reputation for; delivering cutting edge creative, wow-factor websites.

At the core of this partnership is the importance of collaboration; both businesses’ culture is based around working together, innovation and ensuring the best for our clients. The collaboration consists of Collab Media offering social media training to This Is Union clients & them offering web design services to our clients.

As digital marketing is ever-expanding, we wanted to partner with an experienced and established website design agency that could seamlessly help our clients experience, creating an almost one-stop shop for digital services. Upon meeting Scott & Emma, we all immediately realised that our values aligned, and a strategic partnership would be a great option for all involved.

Emma Jenkins, Strategy Director, and Co-Founder has said about the partnership:

“We firmly believe that helping our clients understand the process and the latest nuances of how Digital Marketing can grow their business is vital to how Agency/ Client service should operate. Offering this training now through Ellie and her team will give us that edge we’ve been looking for”.

This Is Union Services:

Competitor Analysis
Online Strategy
Website Design
Web Development
Copywriting & Content
Maintenance Services
Website Hosting

Ellie Rees, Director of Collab Media has said about this relationship:
Over the years we have worked extremely hard on growing our brand to become a thriving digital agency. Our partnership with This Is Union is an exciting opportunity that will help strengthen our offering. We look forward to being able to offer website design to future clients and recognise the importance of having a consistent social media strategy and complimenting website.

Collab Media – 1 year Anniversary

collabmedia 20 July 2017

A huge milestone for Collab Media – We officially turn 1 years old today. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our clients, past & present for their continued support.

The last 365 days have been filled with passion, excitement, hard work, creativity, and a lot of fun! We are very much looking forward to the future of Collab Media, we’ve got lots of exciting collaborations coming up and we cannot wait to share them!

A year on, Collab Media is definitely still developing and we are learning every day, and I’m sure we always will be. The industry is constantly changing therefore so, should Collab Media! but we thought we’d share with you a few things we found useful and some advice that helped Collab Media thrive during the first 12 months.

Be realistic about your time –
The reality is that running a business is not just about doing client work – there’s a lot more to it than that! You have to factor in time for updating accounts, client meetings, quoting, invoicing, socials and marketing – amongst other things.

Know your worth! –
Don’t feel guilty for charging for the work you do. The problem with this is that if you don’t charge enough for your work, certain clients will use you because you’re cheap, and won’t realise the value of your time. You’re effectively charging for your experience and expertise as well as your time. Plus you actually need to charge enough to make a living at the end of the day! It’s worth doing some research into the hourly rates charged in your industry and then taking your own experience and level of service into mind, in order to make sure you’re in the right price range for what you do.

Embrace tools that make life easier –
I use a few online tools to make the daily running of Collab Media much easier to manage.

Schedule Social posts (where appropriate) –
I find scheduling posts can be helpful. Hootsuite allows me to schedule a certain amount of posts at the start of each week. This enables Collab to manage a number of accounts and track clients work.

Socialise –
Don’t just sit in your home office alone all day and not see anyone else – get out and meet other business people, go networking.

Network –
Networking is a great way to meet other like-minded business people. You make some great contacts, collaborators and clients through networking. There are lots of groups locally, and it’s a good idea to try out a few groups and see which you prefer / what works best for you.

Do Great Work –
As a small company, we do our upmost to provide a top class service to our clients and make sure they’re more than happy with everything we do for them. After all, happy clients will come back time and again and will be great brand ambassadors for your company.

Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from your clients –
We ask most clients for feedback on our work and how we were to work with. Don’t be scared to hear any bad points, as well as the good ones – it will help you to iron out any issues that may be standing in your way and may even highlight new services/products you could offer/collaborate with others on to give a better service.

Check out our testimonials here > Testimonials

To celebrate our 1 year anniversary, we decided to invest in a new snazzy logo, we hope you like it as much as we do! #CopperGoals – We’re also currently working on a even bigger rebrand for the business, so watch this page and Thank You for your support!

Instagram Algorithm – Importance for businesses

collabmedia 17 February 2017

When is the best time to post on Instagram?

In a recent poll, 50% of social media managers said that evenings from 7-9pm was the best time to post on Instagram. But because every account has a different audience, in different time zones, each business will have a unique best time to post on Instagram.

Instagram helps with identifying these peak times for business accounts on the platforms by having an insights section. This gives the user inside knowledge on their followers and activity on their account. From peak times, gender, top locations of the customer, the total number of impressions they are getting and even age range of the customers. This is essential information for business to find out more about their demographic. In this post, we’ll show you how to find the best time to post on Instagram for your account, so you can beat the Instagram algorithm.

The way you see posts on Instagram changed at the end of 2016, it completely changed the Instagram game! Instagram announced that they would be replacing the chronological feed with an algorithm that gives priority to posts with higher engagement, which means the more likes and comments your post receives, the more people will see your post! Therefore it’s as important as ever that the content you’re putting out is going to appeal to your customer base otherwise, your posts aren’t going to be seen as regularly by your followers.

If you’re able to generate a lot of engagement on your Instagram posts shortly after posting, this signals to Instagram that your post is quality, engaging content and your post will move to the top of your followers feeds and be shown to more users. There are a handful of ways to increase Instagram engagement, but one of the best ways is to post when your Instagram audience is most active.

The basics of it are that higher engagement leads to more visibility, which leads to higher engagement, which leads to more visibility… and it all starts with when you post on Instagram. Therefore it’s crucial to a business to post at peak times to get higher activity on your content.

When is the Best Time to Post on Instagram?

So now that you understand why posting when your audience is most active is important, it’s time to talk about the best time to post on Instagram. Here are some general rules about posting to Instagram in 2017:

– Post more during off-work hours than during the day. Generally, the best times to post on Instagram are lunch time (11am-1pm) and evenings (7-9pm). Think about it: when do you find yourself checking Instagram the most? Probably not during the work day, even though that may be when you want to post!

– Weekends can be hit-or-miss depending on your audience. B2C (business to customers) companies will likely see better results when posting on weekends than B2B (Business to Business) companies since many businesses only operate during the week.

– Save the important posts for weekdays. The differences are slight, but average Instagram engagement does shift depending on the day.

– Avoid 3 pm, but don’t be afraid to experiment. Weekdays between 3 and 4 pm typically drives the lowest engagement, likely because most users are busy at work at that time.

If you want more tips on how to get the most out of your social media platforms you might be interested in our ‘Action Plan’ which is a guide on how to get the most out of your social media for just £30 it covers Instagram, facebook & twitter.

Get in touch today – [email protected]

Business Goals for 2017 Social Media Marketing

collabmedia 6 January 2017

Have you got a social media strategy for your business for 2017, if not keep reading to find out what discovery paths that matter in social media marketing that help customers find the right business online.

SEARCH. The search path occurs when the customer is “searching” for a company, product, or service. The search path is the province of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), largely on Google but also on sites such as Yelp or Amazon that work via “keywords” to help customers find stuff that they want. AdWords advertising is also helpful in this path.

REVIEW / RECOMMEND / TRUST| These paths are based on “trust indicators.” In it, the customer already has created a list of vendors that they might use, but he is researching “whom to trust.” In this path, a customer might use the “reviews” and/or “stars” on Google or even Facebook reviews as “trust indicators” to predict which business are good (or bad)

EWOM (electronic word of mouth) / SHARE / VIRAL| 
For Example: ‘Yum! Our food was great, lets take a picture of the meal & upload it on Instagram and tag #foodporn) The share path occurs when a customer loves the product, service, or experience enough to “share” it on social media – be that via electronic word of mouth, a share on his or her Facebook page, a “selfie” on Instagram, or a viral video on YouTube.

INTERRUPT | Interrupt marketing occurs when you want to watch a YouTube video but before you can watch it, you have to view an annoying ad, or when you get a spam email. An interrupt path is largely used in advertising and largely used to “push” products that people aren’t proactively looking for.
BROWSE. The browse path is all about getting your message adjacent to what a person is reading or viewing on the Internet. In it, you’re looking for something, reading something, or watching something, and alongside comes something else. For example, you go to YouTube to look up ‘Jeremy Clarkson,” and in the suggested videos at the end is a video for Amazon Prime. Or you see The Grand Tour trailer videos suggested at the right of the screen. You’re not proactively looking it, but you see their information as you “browse” for related content on sites like YouTube, Facebook, or blogs.

AVOID SOCIAL MEDIA GUILT: YOU CAN’T (AND SHOULDN’T) USE EVERY NETWORK

All of these paths can come into play in an effective social media marketing strategy. In an overhyped online world many businesses feel like they “must” be on Twitter, or they “must” have a presence on all social media platforms. Social media guilt, however, is to be avoided: if you define a clear business value proposition, know where your customers are, and establish clear goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), you’ll be able to focus on those social platforms that really help you and ignore the ones that are just hype.

WE currently have 20% off all our services, so grab a bargain while you can and get on top of your social media for your business. More information HERE