NottinghamLIFE: NottinghamLIVE talk to Impression Digital Marketing agency

 

1) What is the name of your company and what do you do?

 

Impression is a digital marketing agency, based in the heart of Nottingham’s Creative Quarter and with an office in London too. We help businesses to improve their online visibility, attract new customers and make more sales. We specialise in search engine optimisation (SEO), paid advertising (PPC), digital PR, content marketing and web design. We are a Google Premier Partner.

 

Our clients benefit from our data-driven approach to digital marketing. We invest heavily in tools which help us to better understand how our client’s websites are performing, including building our own tools and scripts internally, which means we’re not guessing what might work – we’re basing strategies on real data.

We’re very proud of the highly experienced, incredibly skilled team that we’ve grown here in Nottingham and are ambassadors for the city, which we believe is in the early stages of a digital revolution.

 

As well as providing our services to a wide range of clients across Nottinghamshire and beyond, including a huge financial brand in our city, we also work closely with local authorities such as the universities, councils, Creative Quarter and other initiatives to retain and develop talent in the region.

 

Our mission statement is simple; we want to build a world-class team of digital experts who deliver creative campaigns to achieve our clients’ objectives. Everything we do is aimed at outperforming the KPIs we set with our clients on every account.

 

2) Tell us about your company’s history

 

Impression was first registered in November 2012 by our founders Tom Craig and Aaron Dicks.

Having met at university, Tom and Aaron worked together through their part time roles outside of uni time and came together again when they took up positions at a Nottingham based energy business. They enlisted the services of local digital marketing agencies, but found they were dissatisfied with the service provided and the results achieved.

 

The pair decided to set up Impression as a digital marketing agency that would be data driven and results focused. They started out working on the business part time alongside their full time roles, with web development projects making up the bulk of the work at that time. However, it soon became apparent that Impression was growing quickly and could no longer be a part time endeavour.

 

Tom and Aaron left their full time roles to grow Impression, hiring their first member of staff – digital PR manager Rob Tomkinson – in mid-2014. Rob is still an integral part of the team and today has been joined by more than 20 more digital professionals who cover SEO, PPR, PR, content marketing and web design.

 

 

The agency’s growth has been phenomenal to date and has been rewarded by a growing list of fantastic clients. Impression won New Business of the Year at the Nottingham Post Business Awards in 2016 and is a finalist in the Employer of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year and Small Business of the Year categories in the East Midlands Chamber Awards, to be announced in September.

 

3) Who are your typical customers and why do they choose you?

 

Our typical customers are marketing managers or owners of medium to large sized businesses, based here in Nottingham, nationally and internationally.

 

We work across a wide range of industries, including energy, manufacturing, retail, professional services, home improvement, consumer goods, travel, finance and many more. We specialise in ecommerce – businesses that sell products online – and also work with lead generation (brochure) websites.

 

Our clients choose us because we stand out from our competitors in terms of our data driven approach and the results we achieve. We see digital marketing as a balance between science and creativity, which enables us to create highly appealing campaigns that are derived from real data on what the audience wants – and which help our clients achieve their goals.

 

We’re a relatively young agency compared to others in the local area, but with that comes a fresh approach, based on the vast amount of experience within our team. Because we started our agency from scratch, we see this as our opportunity to change things and do them better. We’re here to shake up digital marketing to make sure it delivers the results businesses investing in in deserve.

 

4) How competitive is your marketplace today?

 

Our marketplace today is very competitive. Even here in the local area, there are lots of digital agencies, from Hallam Internet to Boom Online to Anicca in Leicester, all of whom do a great job in their own fields.

 

We’ve managed to overcome the competition by carving out a niche for ourselves as an agency which specialises primarily in ecommerce and which is data-driven and results-focused.

 

The experience within our team, combined with the fact we have a full range of digital services covered in house, means we’ve been able to attract a number of really well known, really successful brands in the local area and beyond to work with us. Our clients recognise that we deliver tangible, measurable results and that we do so with an energy and vibrancy that really sets us apart from our competitors.

 

5) What made you choose Nottingham as the base for your business?

 

When Tom and Aaron were at university in Leeds, they saw the inward investment into the city, particularly around its digital industry.

 

As the investment into the city kept coming, Leeds itself really thrived and the number of digital agencies and people moving into the city to work in digital snowballed. Today, Leeds is home to a fantastic range of digital agencies, and this year ran its own digital marketing conference, Search Leeds, for the first time.

 

Aaron and Tom recognise that the same is happening here in Nottingham. There is a really good amount of investment into the city across various areas – benefiting not just the economy as a whole, but grants and investment available for individual businesses too.

 

What they say in Nottingham now is what they saw in Leeds when its digital scene was just starting to grow. We’re passionate about Nottingham as a city and the potential here, and are certain that we are at the beginning of a digital revolution in the area. We’re here to be a part of that, and to deliver exceptional digital marketing services to the wider business community to further support local growth.

 

6) What would be your advice for businesses starting up in Nottingham?

 

Use what’s here. There are so many opportunities for businesses starting up in Nottingham.

 

Speak to places like Invest in Nottingham and the council; they’ll help you to identify investment opportunities and grants that can help you get off your feet. The universities and authorities such as Creative Quarter and Nottingham Means Business offer some fantastic networking and learning opportunities for entrepreneurs too.

 

It’s also a great city for informal networking and get togethers within different industries. As a digital agency, we really enjoy attending events like Drink Digital, a quarterly meet up of digital companies, and Second Wednesday at Antenna.