After hitting the ground running in 2019, we thought we’d take a breather and reflect on one of our most exciting years to date, 2018! Not only have we been able to expand our internal team, we’ve been given new, exciting opportunities to spread our initiatives and dive deeper into our current service offering as a result. With a continuously developing client list and lots of memorable moments along the way, here are few snapshots of our 2018!

New Faces

We welcomed 6 new members to the Blueberry team as our next move for expanding our creative and digital department. With two industry placement students fresh from local universities and four keen marketers with their own diverse range of skills, our team is growing continuously and we’re steadily culminating our services across the digital spectrum. After taking a hands-on role in 2018, they are now playing a key role in managing campaigns, creating content for our clients and bringing new ideas and skills to our portfolio.

Getting the word out

We’ve been fortunate to have been invited to deliver on several leading expert panels over 2018, including none other than the House of Lords! We were given the opportunity to celebrate the work of the Small Business Charter, an association we currently represent, and discuss how we can work together to drive our local economy forward in the region.

The University of Leeds Business School invited us to present a lecture to first year Marketing students covering what a typical day at Blueberry is like, what it’s like working in a marketing agency and provide advice on how to gain experience in digital marketing. This really made us think about how lucky we are to work in such an exciting and diverse sector.

We also attended an impressive event organised by students at the University of Leeds Business School on Inspirational Storytelling, a powerful tool for capturing student voices and raising awareness of different initiatives. It definitely got our creative juices going and taught us some interesting ways to deliver presentations - something which we have taken on board within our own Blueberry training Academy.

Our involvement in education

We continued our work alongside a local school, Carr Manor Community School, as part of the Enterprise Adviser Network looking to work with the school to understand how businesses can support the pupils best - a great opportunity to hear directly from the younger generation! We had two students do work experience with us and already have new students allocated for the coming year. We understand the importance of business and education being a two-way process, whereby education institutions share the latest research and businesses express how they work best for their industry. Our Director Faresh was appointed as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Leeds Beckett University in 2018 and begun his role of supporting and mentoring students throughout the year, helping those with aspirations to start their own business.

Awards

We’re not one to blow our own trumpet but it was brilliant to receive recognition for our hard work! Not only did Faresh win Creative Entrepreneur of the Year at the English Asian Business Awards, we also won Best Business Development Marketing Agency 2018 by SME News!

And in other news…

We’ve also had a few new exciting developments within the office itself with a marriage, a marathon and a masters! Our existing office space has been transformed over the last months to reflect our personalities at Blueberry and provide creative thinking space for our team. We also saw the competitive side of each other through the introduction of our own Blueberry Quiz Nights which have paved the way for some more social activities throughout 2019.

All in all, 2018 was a brilliant year and one which 2019 has a lot to live up to!

Also written by Zoe