Year in Review 2017

January 11, 2018

So we’re a good working week into the month of January now, we’ve stopped our ‘Happy New Year’s’ for another 12 months and after hitting the ground running the first week of the year, we’re well and truly back in business! To kick-start our blog for 2018, we thought a roundup of the last twelve months would be fitting, as 2017 ended up being quite the year for us.

The company has seen an amazing three years of growth to over £1m annual revenue and we are on-track to continue growing – all by simply achieving excellent results for our clients and working as a seamless extension of their in-house teams. Delivering ROI for clients has seen us sign 28 brand new campaigns, expand six existing client accounts, grow our team by 80% and win four awards since January last year.
We began January 2017 with a huge accolade for Venture Stream, winning two prestigious awards at the Northern Digital Awards 2017, “Best Ecommerce Website” for the design and development of the yogamatters.com website and “Young Digital Marketer of the Year” for Sean Anderson, one of our Digital Marketing Consultants. As well as coming home with these two illustrious trophies, the judges comments were the icing on the cake, noting that we had submitted “an excellent entry that showed outstanding results with conversion and ROI figures clearly presented, showing that it was a clear winner.” Go team!

To keep the momentum going, we entered the “eCommerce Awards 2017” later on in the year and won “Best eCommerce AdWords Campaign” for our work with long-time client Frugi Organic Clothing. Our entry returned the highest Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) of all the entries which impressed the judges and sealed our win. In an awards ceremony that celebrates only the very best online retailers, online companies, agencies, innovations, products and campaigns the ecommerce industry has to offer, this was a very significant win for Venture Stream. Finally we completed our year with our fourth win at the Northern Ecommerce Awards, winning “Sports, Leisure, Toys Ecommerce Website of the Year”, again for our work with yogamatters.com

On the back of our award wins, Commercial Director James Chapman wrote a reflective post on how awards impact businesses and the benefits they can provide. Boosting the reputation of the business, internally they also provide a great motivation for the team.

In May, we decided to get our walking shoes on and join in the “Walk In Her Shoes” campaign, walking 5 miles, 10,0000 steps a day for one week to help raise money for Care International UK, a charity that aims to change lives through supplying clean water supplies across the world. We raised £130 towards this great charity over the course of the week.

Throughout the year, we turned our hands to that thing we do best, sharing our tech knowledge. As a relatively young digital marketing company, we recognised the growing pains of small but successful businesses and shared our tips on how we overcame them. We learned to love Google even more than we already do and even spotted we were used as the test subject for Google’s latest iteration of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

As an ecommerce agency with over 80 years’ combined industry experience, we’ve had our fair share of learning experiences, so we put together three blogs to strengthen your ecommerce game – “4 Reasons Why Your Ecommerce Sales Won’t Grow”; “5 Actionable Insights Online Retailers Can Take from Their Site Search Data” and “Why We Recommend Outsourced Search for Ecommerce Clients.” We looked at various methods of marketing and the ways we encourage our clients to promote their business online, through Email Marketing here and here, LinkedIn, Affiliate Marketing and Live Video.

2017 was the year we expanded our internal team from 10 to 18, you can read more about six of the new hires here, ranging from senior positions to internships. In our recruitment process, we looked further afield to embrace a new way of working and to tempt new talent to our team. We now have five people working remotely around the UK, a new system that works really well, you can read our story here.

We feel that growing existing accounts is the greatest testament to our work and growing our roster demonstrates our creativity and innovative approach as a specialist, eCommerce agency partner. We’re looking forward to the year ahead and maximising on the opportunities and successes from last year.

If you are looking for ecommerce, marketing and help with your website, feel free to get in touch.