Case study: Extreme Creations

Client: Extreme Creations

Work: B2B; offline media relations and corporate communications support.

Duration: Ongoing

Date:  Winter 2010

Background: Extreme Creations is a 14-strong online marketing agency based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

Formed in 2002, the company has worked with a range of local, national and international clients including BIC, North Yorkshire County Council, Global Knives, Wensleydale Creamery, Neoss, Devilbiss, The Black Sheep Brewery and Bradford University.

Extreme Creations offers a full range of online marketing services, including: website design and development; Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and online advertising; analytics and reporting; ecommerce; email marketing; and Content Management Systems (CMS).

Objectives: Extreme Creations is one of the longest established online marketing agencies in Yorkshire. The company wanted to highlight its expertise, experience and hundreds of satisfied customers.

The agency also works with some of the region’s most popular brands and wanted to highlight its high-profile relationships and work.

So Extreme Creations wanted to:

• Generally raise awareness of the company, its services and clients in the Yorkshire region.
• Highlight the agency’s new business wins and successful projects
• Identify and help write award entries for industry and regional awards

With a small budget to undertake this activity Tinderbox designed a strategy that would primarily focus on harnessing regional opportunities for the company.

Strategy:

Tinderbox worked closely with Extreme Creations to uncover their target audience and identify a list of relevant publications.

The strategy included press releases on projects and growth at Extreme, as well as comment opportunities and extended opinion editorial pieces, and identifying and entering relevant awards.

Activity commenced with an entry for the Ackrill Media Group Business Awards in the Best Small Company of the Year category.

Extreme won the award and Tinderbox continued to raise the company’s profile with a number news stories that attracted coverage in the Harrogate Advertiser, Yorkshire Evening Post, Yorkshire Post, TheBusinessDesk.com, The Press (York) and The Drum.

Tinderbox also helped draft and award entry for the DADI awards, in which Extreme were shortlisted.

During the Autumn of 2010 Extreme wanted to reconnect with its customer base and discover what they wanted from an online marketing agency. Tinderbox designed a survey for the agency’s customer base which yielded a number of interesting results.

Extreme used the results to decide upon the company’s future direction, which immediately saw an expansion in the team and the creation of an account management function aimed at increasing retained work.

Tinderbox is also now working with Extreme to develop a presentation and brochure aimed at new business.

Results:

In the 18-months Tinderbox has worked with Extreme the agency has attracted nearly 40 pieces of offline and online media coverage.

The company’s success and shortlisting in regional business and industry awards has also raised the company’s profile among prospective clients and employees.