Member Article

Iain McPherson of Big Bite Creative takes Bdaily behind the business

Big Bite is a team of young and innovative thinkers, designers and developers building big ideas.

Big Bite Creative is a digital agency based in Middlesbrough. The team are heavily involved within the digital hub in Teesside; active within Digital City Business and The Institute of Digital Innovation.

With a strong creative and technical team, Big Bite is adaptable, original and innovative. The Big Bite studio is a very close-knit community that facilitates creative problem solving and leads to a very-high standard of final delivery. We build strong relationship with clients by taking a personal approach to our communications.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

Setting up a company in an already saturated market has made it hard to compete against established companies, particularly at a local level. Before setting up the company we secured contracts that would allow us to run for the initial two months of trading, allowing us to market and develop our sales strategy with the security of paid work.

However, it was hard to make a large sales push without a website! Because we were so active working on client work we did not have time to develop our own website! For the first 4 months of Big Bite’s life, we were without a website… a web design company without a website was embarrassing!

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

The feedback of our new website has been brilliant for us. Within the first few weeks of launching we had over 20,000 page views, with peak visitors at 1700 in a day. We have also had great feedback from the design community, receiving reviews on a number of HTML5 and CSS3 websites.

Our new website is also currently undergoing voting on Awwwards in the hope to become site of the day, you can see our entry here:

http://www.awwwards.com/best-websites/big-bite-creative

We have also gained some key contracts with leading companies locally, nationally and globally. Such companies include Onyx Group, Pizza Hut, Teesside Student Union and DesignMyNight.com deals.

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

Just like any company, we have financial targets, but brand positioning is a more important factor for us. We aim to develop our portfolio further and utilise modern and new technologies.

By staying innovative and utilising these new technologies we can stay ahead of the competition and adopt new trends and styles.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

Get involved and make yourself visible!

A massive part of our success has been our involvement within the local digital and business environment locally. We have particularly worked with Digital City Business and the Institute of Digital Innovation. A friend of Big Bite once told us:

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you”

If you can generate ambassadors to your brand and get people talking about you, it helps massively in your brand development!

Here at Big Bite we developed an interactive HTML5 game, initially to sponsor the TEDx event at Teesside University. Since then we have showcased and presented our game across a number of different events locally. This has been a great marketing tool, which got people talking.

http://bigbitecreative.com/portfolio/html5-pong/

Get involved, do something mad and push your creative boundaries… get out there and get noticed!

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in this region or generally and where your organisation sits within it?

In today’s business world, the environment is changing at an incredibly fast rate, especially within the Internet, and it’s vital that organisations keep up to date. Today, major corporations are rethinking their businesses in terms of the Internet and its new culture and capabilities. The impact and influence of the internet over the past ten years has been immense, and all indications suggest it will continue to grow.

However, the digital market is extremely saturated and price is a deciding factor to organisations, consequently the value of design has been compromised and quality if often very low. As a company we are also competing with the “guy in his bedroom”, with minimal running costs.

Big Bite is priced towards to top end of the market, particularly locally. By offering really creative and technical solutions, we aim to be perceived as a premium brand.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Iain McPherson .