Digital marketing firm eyes up future expansion as it celebrates 20 years

Derby-based digital marketing firm JDR Group has announced plans to further expand its team.

Founded by former colleagues David Roberts, Leanne Mordue and Will Williamson in October 2004, the firm recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, bringing together its 40 employees to celebrate.

The company was among the UK’s first specialised business coaching firms and initially operated out of an office on Friar Gate, where Mordue and Williamson spent their first day assembling desks.

As JDR Group expanded, it moved across several locations in Derby.

In 2007 Roberts proposed shifting the firm’s focus to digital marketing services for its existing clients.

Five years later, JDR Group adopted HubSpot to drive its own content and email marketing, attracting traffic to its website.

The team then began offering these services to clients and has remained a HubSpot partner ever since.

Today, JDR Group holds partner status with HubSpot, a distinction shared by only a select few firms worldwide.

The company now provides SEO, social media, email marketing and content marketing services to hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses across the UK.

Williamson said: “We were so excited when we started, and we set huge ambitions for ourselves to be the best in the industry. We still have those ambitions, but so much else has changed over the past 20 years. I can still remember us having dial-up internet and having to unplug the phones at 4.30 pm and plug in our modem to see if we’d had an email.

“It was a very different world and we didn’t foresee everything in the digital world that would happen. We just knew that it was growing and it was going to be big, but we didn’t realise just how much we would be a part of it.”

Each of the three founders has a different role in the company. Dave Roberts, whose father owned businesses in Birmingham and Nottingham, serves as the managing director.

He said: “My experience working in other businesses led me to want to help other business owners run their own companies better, so I moved into mentoring and JDR Business Coaches was formed. A lot has changed in 20 years, especially our company direction, which came about when we realised how business owners were struggling with marketing themselves at a time when digital marketing was taking off. We’ve expanded ever since, and we want to grow the company even further.”