Celebrating 15 Years Of Northern Media

A retrospective journey through the eyes of our Managing Director

Our 15th year anniversary gave me the opportunity to think back to what 2010 was like and reflect on the journey Northern Media has been on ever since Jonathan and I took the plunge to properly set up the business.

Over the years I’ve started to look at the last 15 years in two phases of the business’ lifecycle… 2010 to 2019 and then 2020 to the present day. So, with that in mind, I’ve created 2 articles, with this being the first.

In 2010, the UK economy was still recovering from the financial crisis of 2008 and it’s safe to say that the UK (and the world!) in 2010 was radically different to now and the marketing landscape was no different. Here are a few examples of what the world of digital was like in 2010 compared to today.

• Instagram was only just launched in 2010
• Search on mobile devices grew four times more than the previous year
• The first iPad was launched
• Clickable Phone Number, and Remarketing Ads were introduced to Google Adwords
• Websites were still built in flash
• Google announces site speed as an SEO ranking factor

Despite the rawness of the financial crisis, Jonathan and I combined our many years’ experience of working within marketing related roles and set up Northern Light Media, as it was called back then. We wanted to create a marketing agency that we would want to work with if we were a client. Northern Light Media would be based on providing open, honest, no BS marketing support to the client with results being at the heart of what we did. 

With Jonathan’s previous role at Yellow Pages and my marketing experience in B2B sectors, we decided to target the sectors we knew and these included manufacturing, construction, various trades and drainage. To be honest those types of clients are still our speciality! 

We offered everything from strategy to design and from websites to photography. We did as much as we could between the 2 of us and outsourced the parts we couldn’t do. 

The business steadily grew over those initial 2 years, picking up local clients like MJ Backhouse, Grahame Stowe Bateson and Excel Roller Shutter who we still work with today. 

We soon realised that, in order to grow more quickly, we needed to recruit. SEO was very much in its infancy back then, and the focus was still on content… “Content is King” was the buzz term at the time! Therefore, in 2013, we made the decision to look for a copywriter and felt that a journalism graduate would be ideal as we needed somebody who was happy to write about drainage and pigeon problems! This is the point where Anthony enters our lives and completely buys into what we wanted to do with the business. His enthusiasm and skill of being able to write about anything made him the perfect fit. Over 11 years later, he’s still with us as a Senior Account Manager.  

The business continued to grow as we became more established in the area and we moved to a larger office in Wakefield city centre. Design was quickly becoming a service in demand and we felt that we needed to get somebody in house to do it rather that continuing to use freelancers. Barnsley College ran a graphic design apprenticeship at the time and that’s when we met Jess. As well as being creative, Jess’ fun personality was infectious so we were delighted when she joined the business in 2014. Fast forward 10 years and she’s now Creative Lead and heads up the creative team.

With our small team in place, we rebranded the business as Northern Media on the back of our growing reputation for being a full service marketing agency across Yorkshire. We very much focused on developing close client relationships combined with delivering results from our marketing campaigns. 

The team grew and evolved into having Marketing Executives managing client relationships. Each marketing executive had a broad knowledge and experience of marketing which meant they could provide results driven marketing activities ranging from SEO to social media and email marketing.  

the year of change

2016 saw us recruit our first website developer. Up to that point we had outsourced all of our website work but we recognised that WordPress was becoming a popular CMS and wanted to explore it with our own in house developer.  

We also began our relationship with Huddersfield University at this point, giving students in the Journalism and Design faculties opportunities to gain experience within an agency environment. Rory was one of the original placement students and, after completing his degree, he joined full time and has been with us ever since. Today his role is Senior Digital Designer.   

The end of 2016 also saw us move to a new office on the outskirts of Wakefield, which would allow us to expand over the coming years and so we set about putting a strategy in place that would support our long-term growth plans. This included: 

• Redefining who Northern Media is as an agency in terms of vision, values and culture 
• Recruiting a Business Development Manager that would target our typical client profiles 
• Targeting suitable public sector tender opportunities 
• Bringing in a Client Services Manager to oversee service delivery and retention 
• Hiring additional members for the account management team to support client growth 
• Expanding the project and web development team in order to manage the increase in website work  

We didn’t know at the time that this period would play a key role in shaping Northern Media as it is now but not necessarily for the reasons we had hoped. 

TBC…