10 amazing stats which prove that 2018 was Bring Digital’s most incredible year yet

2019 has finally arrived. And while we’re excited for all the possibilities that the new year presents, we’re still sad to say goodbye to what was arguably our best year yet.

2018 was the year that Bring Digital soared. It was a year of new faces, new ideas and more awards than you could shake a stick at.

Here are the numbers that show just how incredible 2018 was for us.

1. Almost 9 million additional organic sessions for our clients vs 2017

2018 was, in many ways, a year of turmoil for the SEO world. It was the year that saw the switch to mobile-first indexing, voice search taking off, and Google optimising for user intent rather than for keywords.

Yet despite all this change, we hit it out of the park for our clients.

By ensuring our SEO strategies were adaptable, we were able to react to anything that Google threw at us. We went beyond the typical remit of keyword optimisation to focus more on user-focused design (particularly on mobile), creating content that answered the questions that searchers were asking. On top of this, we also put plenty of development into preparing our clients for the future.

By keeping our eyes on what was ahead, our clients reaped the rewards.

2. Almost £22 million in PPC revenue for our clients in 2018

In 2018, we were trusted with some huge PPC accounts with a mission to help our clients reach highly ambitious sales targets.

It’s thanks to the work of our incredibly talented PPC team that we were able not only to meet our clients’ expectations but to exceed them, too.

Faced with the challenge of driving thousands of new sales while sticking within tight budget constraints, our team delivered some truly world-class work. By going through accounts with a fine-toothed comb, they were able to identify a wealth of opportunities to redirect spend to where it would drive the very best results.

We can’t wait to help them hit even higher targets in the year ahead.

3. We generated 484 links for our clients in top publications

Getting your brand noticed isn’t easy. Even though you know how brilliant you are, you face the challenge of getting other people to realise it too, and that’s where our Content Marketing team comes in.

But in 2018, we went beyond just getting our clients noticed. We made our clients famous.

It takes a strong team with incredible knowledge of their clients, their audiences and the industry to get coverage in online publications like The Times, Cosmopolitan, Buzzfeed and The Mirror — and that’s exactly what we did. We invested heavily into creating innovative content marketing strategies that would get positive press coverage for our clients to help build their brand identity with their ideal audience — and drive plenty of traffic to their sites as a result.

Here’s a sample of the kind of outstanding results we were able to generate from just one content marketing campaign.

4. We won 15 new clients

It’s always a joy to win a new client. It’s an opportunity to work with new people, explore exciting new ideas, and help them overcome what stands between them and their future accomplishments.

And last year, we got to work with some of the most exciting businesses in the UK right now. From famous bedding brands to luxury jewellers and online fashion retailers, we now have a wealth of businesses that we have the privilege to call clients — and we’re loving every minute of it.

Better still? We grew contracts with some incredible existing clients, too. But all that work meant that our staff would be under a lot of pressure to deliver results.

It was time to make some hires.

5. We hired 15 new marketing experts

With so many new clients on the cards, we had to make sure we had a strong team that could deliver the excellent results that Bring Digital is known for.

Our HR team certainly had their work cut out for them this year. They arranged multiple interviews and tasks for dozens of candidates, carefully analysing each application to ensure we got the right person for the role.

And thanks to that hard work, we now have the strongest Bring Digital team ever.

In our ranks sit a mix of talented graduates, experienced in-house marketers and some agency veterans, all working together to produce the results that have made Bring Digital stand out in an incredibly competitive industry.

6. We introduced 3 new departments to the business

Winning big new contracts and hiring new talent in the business also gave us the opportunity to expand not only our client list but also our service offering.

Analytics

As digital is constantly changing, we wanted to create a department that was dedicated to using onsite data to help clients make better usability decisions.

That’s why, in 2018, we hired Mel Walker as our first Head of Analytics.

Mel joined the team right at the beginning of 2018 with a wealth of experience in all things data, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), web analytics and customer profiling. Mel’s passion is using data to identify ways to drastically improve the conversation rates of our clients’ websites.

Needless to say, the department has been a smash hit. Many of our biggest clients have extended their contracts to include analytics work after seeing the value displayed by Mel and her team since we started offering CRO as a service.

Affiliates

Stacey, our current Head of Affiliates, joined Bring Digital in June 2017 after heading up the PPC team at AO.com.

Having led an in-house digital team herself, Stacey knew that brands were losing trust in the traditional affiliate networks. She believed that there was an opportunity for Bring Digital to help people fall back in love with affiliate marketing if we could harness the best technology to create a network people believed in.

That’s why in October, we launched our affiliate marketing programme, BringConnected. BringConnected blends the best aspects of affiliate management agencies with global publisher networks to provide an ‘all-in-one’ solution.

You can learn all about BringConnected here.

Content Marketing

When Chrissy joined us as Content Manager in late 2017, she helped us realise that we needed to go for bigger and bolder content campaigns if we wanted to drive the kind of brand authority that our clients needed to succeed.

That’s why in April, Chrissy stepped up to Head of Content Marketing, a new department that would be dedicated to devising and executing content campaigns for our clients that get noticed.

So far, our Content Marketing team has seen some incredible successes, including one campaign that won no less than 3 prestigious industry awards and millions of online views.

Speaking of which…

7. We were nominated for 22 prestigious industry awards…

2018 felt like the year when everyone stood up and took notice of Bring Digital.

In less than 12 months, our humble agency was shortlisted for a staggering 22 industry awards for a variety of categories, including Best Content Campaign, Large Digital Agency of the Year, and Employer of the Year.

Naturally, we were thrilled. It’s an honour to be recognised as a contender for the top spot for so many different categories, especially when we’ve been up against some of the biggest names in UK marketing.

But it didn’t end there.

8. … and won no less than 6 of them

To our delight, we weren’t just nominated for awards — we got to take plenty of them home with us, too!

Here are the 6 big awards that we won in 2018:

• UK Agency Awards 2018 — ‘Most Impressive Small Agency Growth’
• Bolton Business Awards 2018 — ‘Young Person of the Year (Ellie Entwistle, Bring Digital)’
• Prolific North Awards 2018 —- ‘Large Digital Agency of the Year’
• Northern eCommerce Awards 2018 — ‘Best Content Campaign (Bring Digital for Ann Summers)’
• The Drum Content Awards 2018 — ‘Best Retail Content Marketing Campaign (Bring Digital for Ann Summers)’
• CIPR PRide Awards 2018 — ‘Best Use of Content (Bring Digital for Ann Summers)’

It’ll be a tough record to beat in 2019 — but we love a challenge.

9. We launched 25 new websites

At Bring Digital, we don’t just help our clients optimise existing websites — we build them new ones, too.

And in 2018, we built a lot of them.

Our web development team successfully launched a grand total of 25 client websites. That’s nearly one every fortnight.

And their hard work paid off: many of our clients were so happy with their new website that they called to thank the team personally.

10. We celebrated our 6th birthday

It’s hard to believe that it was just 6 years ago that our Managing Director David Ingram founded Bring Digital from the spare room of his house.

Now, we’re a 35-strong team of some of the most talented marketers in the business, nationally recognised for producing outstanding work for some of the UK’s biggest brands.

What a rollercoaster it’s been.

For us, though, the journey has only just begun. We’re looking ahead at 2019 with renewed vigour, excited for all the incredible opportunities that will come our way, the new people we’ll meet, and the new heights we’ll reach.

Bring it on.