With offices shut and many businesses just simply focusing on survival this year, it has been tough for everyone to know where best to focus their efforts, and what to put their reduced budgets into. We’ve seen some themes in the work our clients and prospects have been seeking however and in this article we wanted to review some of the project work we have been doing, whilst also rounding up the opportunities that still present themselves to businesses.

Digital, understandably, has played a bigger part of our client’s focuses in 2020, but we’ve also seen many looking forward and exploring ways of digitally rewarding to incentivise staff after a tricky past year.

Digital Assets

With the world becoming more and more virtual by the day, it’s only natural that we saw a big shift in enquiries seeking support with digital assets to communicate key business and product messages to both global and local audiences.

We were excited to get our teeth stuck in to virtual event conference opportunities, delivering engaging online events that spanned the globe and involved, on occasions, attendances of 200+ delegates.

There is much more to putting together a virtual event than one might expect however, with our team showing their true creative capabilities when delivering supporting PowerPoint presentations, video content that included award and host VT’s, as well as full supporting soundtracks and themes (to name but a few). We’re also proud to have worked in partnership with other agencies.

With the shift towards virtual and hybrid likely to continue for the foreseeable future, we look forward to continue to push the boundaries of this digital world, whilst delivering memorable and engaging events for our clients.

Check out our Virtual Event Show Reel here for information on what goes into delivering these projects.

Online Employee Engagement

With the majority of businesses forced to begin remote working from March 2020, teams across the land had to seek new ways of staying connected with their employees and ensuring they were receiving brand updates.

The challenge of this year for many of our clients and prospects has been ensuring employee engagement, whilst bearing in mind the cost-saving strategies that many had to put in place. Luckily, our team here at FMI were already set to deliver these low-budget projects quickly and effectively, with a number of smart, attractive options that guaranteed accessibility and quick set up times.

We made the most of social platforms this year, using Facebook to create private, online groups to help client’s on limited budgets. We arranged the cascading of communication to call centre and retail staff and used the online community to push out product information, incentives as well as well-being advice. Success was measured on engagement levels and we proudly saw initial member take-up of 65%.

In addition to this, our new ‘ready-made’ sales engagement platform was developed, allowing our clients a cost-effective solution for reaching their channel staff with sales training tools. The platform can be easily branded and allows access for a global audience, with tailored content output to make targeted messaging simple.

Travel Incentives

You would be forgiven to think that travel was the last thing on the mind of businesses this year, but, despite the restrictions, we have been positively surprised to see prospects looking towards the later stages of 2021 and enquiring about the possibility of incentive travel trips. After all, what says thank you after a year of frustrations more than a trip across the globe?

The interest could of course have had something to do with our successes at this year’s Incentive Awards. We were delighted to be awarded Best Incentive Travel Programme for our ‘Wild About Huawei’ trip to South Africa, and we can’t wait to be arranging unforgettable trips once again… our Events Team are in desperate need of a getaway!

Looking forward…

Channel engagement is at the heart of what we do as an agency and we look forward to continuing to help global brands and businesses to motivate and build greater brand awareness with their employees and partners during these changes that many of us are seeing to our working lives.

We have further engagement solutions set to launch in 2021 and we’re excited to share this with clients and partners in the New Year. We’re determined to make 2021 a better year for all.