Member Article

Digital marketing agency Mira doubles in size

A NEWCASTLE-BASED digital marketing agency has doubled in size in a year.

MIRA Marketing was established in 2018 and joined forces with north east entrepreneur and investor Neil Stephenson in 2020. Growth was steady until the Covid pandemic drove millions of shoppers online.

Founder and CEO Stuart Bramley explained: “Lockdown was the trigger for huge growth for us, but we’ve continued on the same trajectory after the restrictions eased.

“Online retailers grasped the opportunity of so many more people shopping online and local and regional businesses turned to us to grow their businesses through bespoke digital marketing solutions. The recent Black Friday sales weekend was important to us – it was very successful for ourselves and our clients, many of whom saw huge spikes in revenue.

“Since August last year our turnover has doubled, profits have doubled and the team has grown from two of us to six. We’ve gone from having five clients to having 29 – with more in the pipeline.”

Stuart and his team work hard to stay ahead of trends and developments in the online marketing sector.

“We’ve recently transitioned some of our clients over to Amazon which is new to us. Clients are experiencing good growth through our partnership with them. Apple released iOS14.5 earlier this year and the update impacted tracking across platforms and devices. We pivoted our media buying to Amazon marketplace to help stabilise clients’ performance. This has been working very well for our clients, with them adding new streams of revenue,” explained Stuart

“The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing and we make sure we’re well aware of what’s going on – new platforms updates, new software, new processes or operating systems. It is important we continue to monitor the possible legislation around how cookies can be used by website owners – this might be a game-changer in digital marketing, and we’re obviously looking at other means of data reporting already.

“Meanwhile, the email marketing side of MIRA is also growing massively – some of our clients are attributing more than 25 per cent of their revenue to our email campaigns.”

To accommodate the growing team, MIRA has moved into larger offices at its Hoults Yard base.

“We just needed the space for our new team members - our work and approach is liked and respected by our growing list of clients. We create bespoke campaigns for them, constantly monitoring, tweaking and scaling the campaigns in response to the data we analyse. We offer a very personal service, not an off-the-shelf solution, and we get to know our clients very well and embed into their team as an external marketing arm,” he said.

“We also offer Shopify web development services, partly because it’s so vital for a company’s website and landing page to be right in order to convert our client’s customers.”

And while he’s overseen the rapid expansion of MIRA, Stuart is also launching a new, complementary business. Snap-Now is his new ecommerce photography business, which will supply clients with first class photography and video for their websites and social media platforms.

“It’s a natural add-on to what we’re doing already and another service we can offer our clients. I think the content creation side of things will become increasingly important to us and the industry as a whole,” said Stuart.

A former semi-professional footballer, Stuart completed a football scholarship and business management degree at Lyon College in America.

After launching MIRA Marketing in 2018, Stuart was quickly joined by childhood friend Adam Hunter, who is the company’s Digital Marketing Manager.

Clients include Scalextric, Hornby Hobbies, top sports brands and online retailers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Hoults Yard .