Can you share a few details about the founding story behind Applied Digital Marketing?
Founded in 1999 by Steve Sykes whose background was in industrial automation, Applied Digital Marketing has been designing and developing websites, business applications and creating marketing strategies for local, national, and global businesses ever since. The company’s initial projects included websites for international motorbike racer James Whitham and the Virgin Mobile British Superbike race team, along with high-end pushchair manufacturer iCandy. Since then we have grown and branched out into all aspects of digital and offline marketing, building a team of experts in the field of strategy, branding, design, website development, and marketing to service the needs of clients from a wide range of business sectors. Applied has built a deserved reputation for both technical excellence and strategic marketing and is trusted by businesses of all sizes to help them achieve their marketing goals.What specific services do you offer?
Everything we do for our clients starts with their foundations. We apply our discovery process and evidence-based research to fully understand their business and their commercial objectives. From this stage our core services are: brand strategy and development, marketing strategy and activation and website design and development. B2B Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategic communications is a new service we’ve been providing to a number of our customers over the past 12 months. This growing area of our expertise aims to help companies define their sustainability and ESG goals, shape these into clear and understandable objectives, and then articulate them in an engaging way that evidences genuine progress. A key area of our expertise in this area is plain speaking, avoiding greenwashing jargon, and creating content that looks and feels authentic, accountable and measurable.What are the biggest challenges digital marketers face today and what is your strategy for overcoming them?
The biggest challenge digital marketers face (and have always faced) is the dynamic nature of the industry. New technology is constantly driving change in the marketing platforms we use and the way society engages with them. Our ongoing challenge is to be at the forefront of these advancements, testing the performance of each against the unique goals of every client, the objectives of our marketing campaigns whilst targeting specific but evolving, customer segments.What is the technology stack behind your company?
Hosted on 100% sustainable electric powered servers our websites are built on Laravel and Statamic. Laravel’s powerful framework provides an expressive, elegant syntax that simplifies development and makes it easy to build scalable applications. Since Statamic is built on top of Laravel, we get access to all of Laravel’s features and tools while building a CMS. This gives us the best of both worlds, powerful content management alongside a full-stack framework. Statamic allows our developers to define custom content types and data structures and having this flexibility makes it ideal for projects that require unique or complex content models. Statamic has its own templating language, which integrates well with Laravel’s Blade engine, giving the development team flexibility in how they build and design pages.What sets you apart from your competitors?
Probity, technical rigour, and creative thinking. We never stop asking questions, and we’re always stress testing the logic and strategy we apply to resolving our client’s challenges. In essence, it’s the level at which we intrinsically understand our customers’ businesses. Our Foundations service, at which each project and customer relationship begins, means we have a clear set of business goals and objectives and we know what success looks like for them – whether we’re developing brand or marketing strategies or designing and building new websites. When we combine this with the years of experience within our team, specialist skill sets, and our brand promise, we really are able to set ourselves apart from the competition. Applied Brand Promise- Do the right thing
- Challenge our limits
- Go above and beyond expectations
- Lead our future
Is there anything else about your work that you’d like to share that we haven’t covered?
Over the last couple of years, we’ve worked closely with a selection of our customers to develop Environmental and Social Governance marketing strategies…. And in 2025 are launching “ESG Advantage?” This new part of our service offering is designed to help our clients organise the sustainability and ESG aspects of their marketing proposition into a compelling narrative that adds real value to what they do. We know that many of our clients now understand that sustainability and ESG, and those softer aspects of their business, are now key drivers to winning new clients. We’re all now being assessed and evaluated (by our employees, suppliers, and customers) on how we demonstrate our responsibilities to the environment and our local communities. ESG Advantage is a facilitated process that enables our clients to clarify their thinking in this area, build a story that feels authentic, and map a way to articulate this through various means, such as branding, website content, employee communications, and social media activation. Having celebrated our 25th anniversary in 2024 we’re excited to see how Applied Digital Marketing evolves over the next few years. Our history, like most digital marketing and web development agencies, has been heavily influenced by the dominance of Google which could now be on the decline with the rise of social search and AI. As a result, our core services of branding, marketing, and website development will adapt and develop as they always have.To learn more about Applied Digital, you can visit www.applieddigital.co.uk
