Fast risers: Impression
This time around in our monthly look at the East Midlands fastest-growing companies we look at Nottingham-based digital marketing agency Impression.
What is your company called?
Impression
What does it do?
We’re a digital marketing agency which provides SEO, PPC, PR and content marketing services to clients primarily in ecommerce, but also across various industries including professional services, tourism, hospitality, manufacturing and renewable energy.
When was it established?
November 2012.
How fast are you growing each year?
In terms of team number, we’ve grown significantly since our inception in 2012 from 2 to 20 colleagues. We are adding new clients every month and are very pleased with our rate of growth at this stage.
To what do you attribute your growth?
Aaron and Tom started Impression because they saw a need for a results driven digital marketing agency which doesn’t rely on templates or outdated processes. Having worked themselves with a number of agencies in their previous roles at a large energy company, they were dissatisfied with the level of service and ROI achieved and wanted to provide something different.
We’ve retained this philosophy through our growth and continue to focus on delivering tangible results for our clients. If they’re not making more money as a result of our work, we see that as a failing. This means we spend a lot of time understanding our clients’ businesses and their industries, getting to know which products or services deliver the highest margins and where the focus of the business lies. We integrate ourselves into existing marketing teams to ensure the work we do fits with the overriding goals of the company we’re working for.
We believe it is this focus on results which sets us apart and has contributed to our fast growth. We’ve entered a competitive market and even in our local area, there are lots of digital marketing agencies. But our dedication to delivering results has enabled us to grow through reputation and word of mouth primarily, whilst our own internal marketing work also delivers a good stream of new leads into our business.
It’s not just the work we do that has got us to where we are today, though. Anyone who’s met us knows us as a friendly group; we socialise as a team, we socialise with our clients and our company culture has been built around a collaborative, creative environment, which our clients really enjoy. They like to work with us and they like to tell others about us. That’s why we’re where we are now.
What are you doing that your competitors aren’t?
When you’re investing in digital marketing services from an external company, you need to know that that company understands your needs and goals. For us, the big area that helps us stand out from our competitors is our approach to understanding our clients’ businesses.
We take the time to get to know what our clients are trying to achieve and to truly understand their business, their products and their services. The recommendations we make are tailored specifically to each client. In our industry, we essentially sell our time and far too often, we see examples of other agency work which has been templated to cut down on the time required to complete the work. That’s not what we’re about; we’re about tailored approaches which deliver real results which you can see on your bottom line.
In the most practical sense, we’re also doing a lot of content marketing and digital PR that our competitors aren’t. With an in house team of designers and developers working alongside our content marketers and SEO specialists, we’re able to work on projects that other agencies without these capabilities can’t. For example, our ‘History of Interior Design’ piece for Harvey Water Softeners is an example of interactive creative content that received a great deal of acclaim, was featured in dozens of places around the web and contributed to improved search rankings and sales numbers. Our recent project with our local client Company Check was a survey of UK businesses which became a full length report that was featured in the likes of Forbes, International Business Times, Yahoo News and many more.
Where do you want you company to be in five years’ time?
Our goal is to continue to grow our business through continued service to existing clients, the addition of new clients and the development of our team.
We want to stay at the forefront of digital marketing techniques and are also investing in creating our own tools to better equip ourselves and our clients to respond to the fast changing online world. We’re working with more and more ecommerce businesses and in five years’ time, we want to be the most successful digital marketing agency in the Midlands, working with the top brands in the area and across the UK. We’re well on our way to positioning ourselves as leaders in our industry through our feature at high profile industry events, and hope to achieve industry awards to solidify that position in the coming years.
