Digital agency Abstrakt is amplifying their message with brand advocacy

Originally starting as a brand agency from an at home studio, business owners Lauren and Marc Swarbrick wanted to build an agency that kept their values at its core. The agency takes great pride in doing their very best work and exceeding customer expectations, never simply saying yes and maintaining client partnerships that have grown and developed over the last thirteen years.

We had a good chinwag with Abstrakt’s Campaign Marketing Manager, Lauren Irwin, to find out more about the agency and why they’ve found Brand Message’s employee advocacy platform essential to their business.

Finding the time to shout about success

“When you’re working with a multitude of client’s every single day and want to ensure they’re getting the very best out of the team, it’s difficult to find the time to push Abstrakt’s own content and drive more awareness of the business, and what we’re about.”

As a brand admin on Abstrakt’s Brand Message, Lauren said it makes it easy for her to upload content for the rest of the team to share and schedule at their leisure, as well as scheduling to our company LinkedIn and Twitter.

Working with local brands such as Olympic Shaver Centre, KRCS and Savoy Cinemas as well as International names such as Tweezerman, Scape Group Ltd and Grafton International, Lauren tells us that they didn’t always find the time to share the projects they’d been working on.

“Don’t get us wrong, we absolutely love the pace of work coming through the agency and we get to work on really exciting projects. Our biggest challenge is actually shouting about them! Sometimes we never got around to taking a moment to just say, hey, we did that and let it sink in because we’re already onto the next thing.”

Lauren found that they weren’t celebrating their victories or sitting back to appreciate the work they’d achieved. The agency had grown considerably since 2016 when they brought in a digital arm, with both design and Craft CMS web development and brand at their core. Their talented team of experienced professionals had a whole network of their own from several years within the industry and they wanted a way to leverage their overall reach and not just the business’s.

Using Brand Message initially meant that content could be crafted and made easily available to the team. As time went on using the advocacy platform, the team grew more confident in personalising their own messaging and were proactively requesting more content to share. That led to more individuals in the agency writing articles for the website too.

Even skipping the tea round can be rewarding, who knew?

Sounds good to us! We asked Lauren what she thought about the engagement they’d seen from using Brand Message across LinkedIn and Twitter too. She said that it was never a concern of theirs that they might lose engagement on the company profiles. It was more important to show enthusiasm from the team and their own message being shared instead.

“Growing our social following on our business accounts isn’t necessarily a key driver for us. We’d rather have content shared directly from “the horse's mouth” as it were, and in this case, it’s our biggest advocates; the team!”

The content that’s shared through Brand Message always links back to their agency website and so, they’ve seen a big increase in traffic from LinkedIn and Twitter whilst using the advocacy platform to share content.

"There was some concern around reader fatigue and the message being the same for everyone that shared it, but we have such diverse networks between the seven of us, we didn’t really find that was the case in the end. Different members of the team like to personalise the content a little around their own area of expertise too."

What the team at Abstrakt had to say about Brand Message

Finally, we asked Lauren at Abstrakt what she would say to a company who was considering using Brand Message in their business as their employee advocacy platform….

...so, did Abstrakt recommend Brand Message?

“Brand Message isn’t just a scheduling tool, it really motivates teams to get onboard sharing content, empowers them to start creating their own and definitely promotes a healthy level of competition. It’s really shown us the value of sharing content to our personal networks. At the end of the day, as cheesy as it sounds, the team is a business’s best asset and word-of-mouth is golden.”