TILDA SUCCESS STORIES

— Hi, yes, I'm Lee Sanders, I work at Frank PR. I look after all the creative coming out of Frank, so everything from the studio to creative ideas and idea initiation.

— So Frank is a PR agency based in London, UK. We believe that ideas should be really worth talking about, and we work with businesses, brands, and products. Our main goal is to build brands, get people spoken about and change the way people show up in the world.

We've been around for nearly 22 years and we’ve done some amazing work along the way. For example, we were the agency behind the famous Weetabix & Beans campaign, we were responsible for completely rewilding Trafalgar square, we also did "Little green flags," and much more.

So that has resulted in our agency being one of the most awarded agencies in London. A few people will probably challenge that and question us because they might believe the same, but we really think we have a firm stake in it.

If you're ever in our office, you will see a plethora of trophies, frames, and certificates that we've won throughout all of our time. We even have an opening position for an award polisher, for those who are job-hunting at the moment :)

— Like most agencies in the world, we don't really have shop windows. We're not physical shops. So for us, a website is probably one of the most important ways of attracting new customers, telling people what we do, hiring new people, and so on. Basically, our website is our shop window.

Previously, we had a reputation for having a great website. However, our first website—as amazing as it was—wasn't SEO readable, and none of the keywords or anything could be picked up by Google, which in a world of digital marketing is a big problem.

So when we initially looked to rebuild our website, we did consider two or three website builders that have a lot of templates and in general make building websites easier. However, they don't really allow much customization and they all end up looking slightly the same. As an agency that prides itself on standing out from the crowd, we didn't feel like this could work.

Once we started bringing the website to life with Tilda, we realized that we'd been missing a big trick here. Purely because of what we wanted to do. We wanted so much to happen on the website—animation, scrolling, and scrolling behaviors—and all of that was just unachievable with some other platforms. And I think Tilda really helped us to deliver that.

And also it made it quite easy. There are parts that are premade here that can now be changed and done without needing to pay for a web developer or a designer or anything like that.

— Funnily enough, we don’t. There isn't actually anyone in our agency with any developer knowledge. A few people know HTML, and other few know CSS. Our website is looked after by a small team. The whole agency is just about 40 people. We have one or two designers. We also have a lot of disciplines within the agency, whether it's socials, copywriters, or creatives that can tap in and help. So it's basically maintained between everyone and we all chip in when needed.

However, we don't actually need to use it that often purely because most of it is integrated through Tilda’s services. So if we need to change text, images, or copy—which is predominantly what we need to do—then we just get it done.

— We successfully launched our new website three-four weeks ago so it’s still a baby in terms of website numbers. There are actually still parts of it where things don’t click through but 99.9% of it works. We’re getting there.

— We’ve got a mix of zero blocks and a mix of the pre-designed blocks. If we can't make something work how we want to make it work, we use the Zero Blocks, pull and drag them around. And this is essentially exactly what we want to do—being able to visually put what we want on a page without having to mess around with code or anything like that. It's a massive help for us, especially as we don't have the skillset to do so.

When people land on our website, we have sort of our initial landing. As you scroll down the page, it starts to go across. That’s the bit that we love the most about the website. This whole movement on the web is something we really wanted to explore and bring to life because there are so many websites where you scroll down and they get boring and repetitive.

Again, as an agency that positions itself as different from all others, we wanted people to be on a website and not actually know where they are, because it might go in all those unexpected directions.

We use that scrolling functionality to be able to tell our story of who we are and what we do in a fun, interesting way that sort of makes people sit up and realize that, okay, I'm not on a normal website. I'm not talking to a normal, boring agency that’s going to deliver me the same work as my last one. This agency is going to give me something so different.

— In the world of PR, it's never obvious who’s done what bit of work. We want to make sure that we have ownership of all the great work that we do. So the first important part of our website is the portfolio section, where we display some of the latest and the biggest things that we've done. It constantly updates as we're doing new work.

The second most important part for us is the contact section. We need people to easily get in touch with us. If people are stuck and don't know what to say, then we've given them random problems that we call "Would you rather's." For example, would you rather have fingers for toes or toes for fingers? Just some fun prompts for people to message us with. Sometimes they do, sometimes they just go straight with what they want.

Properly introducing the staff on the website was an important thing for us as well as the recruitment part. We didn’t want it to feel boring and corporate. Instead, we wanted to show the fun that everyone has working at Frank. So our website is not only about showing our potential new clients the work we do, but it's also about showing people that might want to join Frank, what life here could be like.

— The first and biggest benefit for us is the fact that we are now ranked on Google through SEO. It was a huge part of the reason that we actually updated our website—we realized in a modern age we need to rank.

And the second part is that as soon as we hit live on our website people were messaging us straight away, saying, "I want to work with you guys. I love the work. I love your website." We actually had a new business lead within the first two days but I can't say who it was for legal reasons.

It's always a bit of a nervous time making a change on a website purely because that is the face part of a business. So the fact that we had new business leads and such a warm reception and welcome from people since changing over has been great. By the way, the team has loved it too, because it's not such labor to have to change and update anything.

— The mission of Frank always has and always will be to create talkability, which is essentially ways to get brands, products, and people spoken about. Our founder Graham coined that phrase nearly 22 years ago, and since then it has translated into modern terms like shareability, ownability—pretty much anything "ability" in marketing seems to stem from talkability.

The most important thing though is that this concept is still as relevant today as it was two decades ago. We've done it for a long time and will continue to do it for a long time, whether that's through social media, consumer PR materials, or business pages.

We don’t necessarily have to come up with a new strategy every time for every single business because we know that it should be about what is the best idea for this particular company, not what it's going to get any coverage. So that's how we generate ideas that are worth talking about rather than just stories.