Below deck: August 2024

First of all, we learnt a new word this month and we’re excited to share it with you. It’s ‘enshittification’, and it’s extremely satisfying to say out loud. Go on, try it. Now that’s out of the way, you can uncover exactly what it means in our August insights, which also include a fast way to start leveraging LinkedIn (especially if you’ve not posted in a long time), tips on navigating Google’s AI era, and guidance on making brand advocacy easy and convenient for your customers. Let’s dive in.

How to turn your customers into brand advocates

Every account manager knows customer advocacy is far more than simply satisfying clients – it’s about exceeding their expectations. By anticipating our clients’ needs and building trust, we foster strong relationships that lead to natural loyalty and valuable feedback. 

But customer advocacy isn’t only essential for our continual improvement – it also makes it easier for new clients to find us. Great relationships lead to great recommendations. According to SEMrush, 88% of people trust a brand most when it’s recommended by a friend or family member. 

So how can you foster customer advocacy? We do it through best-in-class service and by actively creating opportunities for clients to conveniently share success stories (this can be as simple as sending a personalised follow-up email asking for feedback). To measure our own success, we focus on client retention and maintain a client feedback loop that helps us constantly refine our approach.

Izzy Massey, senior account manager, The Bigger Boat

Your fast pass to leveraging (and loving) LinkedIn

It’s a word that fills many with dread. You guessed it: networking. But, love it or loathe it, there’s no denying its effectiveness. And if you’re not one for in-person events (although we’re advocates of those too), there’s a quicker way to build valuable connections and boost brand awareness that you might have been neglecting. Yep – LinkedIn.

If you haven’t been active on the platform for a while, getting started can feel daunting, but it doesn’t take much to start leveraging this resource. First of all, every single person in your organisation has a different network. So, if you encourage your team to share posts from your company page (within the first hour of posting for maximum reach), you’re not only tapping into the page’s followers, but potentially expanding your reach to hundreds, if not thousands, of professionals across various industries. It takes minimal effort to reshare a post, but the ripple effect can be huge.

Lauren Boyles, junior social media manager, Scriba PR

Navigating Google’s AI era

We’re at an interesting juncture in Google’s history. The advent of AI is starting to change user behaviour quite dramatically, with some experts speculating that Google’s answer to the rise of AI-driven content may be to default to not indexing any new pages that get published online. 

This shift marks a huge change from Google's historical approach to cataloguing the entire web. And, while it remains the most-used search engine, Google’s market share is declining, with competitors like Bing experiencing growth. The rise of platforms like ChatGPT, which saw a massive 1078% increase in visits from November 2022 to April 2024, also reflects a shift towards more conversational, user-friendly search experiences.

Part of this is because of a process called ‘enshittification’, which is, put simply: a re-prioritisation pattern where online product and service providers experience a decline (get worse) in quality over time. At TBB, we don’t need to worry much about this, since we’ve never produced content in such a way that we’re trying to manipulate the algorithm. We prioritise natural, user-first, genuinely useful content, always. And as long as we keep putting users first, the cream will always rise to the top.

Ewan Burkinshaw, digital marketing manager, The Bigger Boat

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