2018 was a great year for us, not only did we generate many successes for our clients, but we were given many opportunities to work with so many brands from across Yorkshire. Here are our top five highlights from the year:
Simon Baynes Wholesale in the Yorkshire Post
Simon Baynes Wholesale is a family-run enterprise that started as a fruit and veg stall at the York Market. Over the years, the business evolved, and they now run their own greengrocers and wholesale business here in York.
To mark 100 years in business, we worked with Simon Baynes Wholesale to generate a campaign to educate the public and business on the benefits of eating locally grown food.
Throughout 2018, the business was featured in several B2C and B2B publications such as the Yorkshire Post, York Press and Fresh Produce Journal. Due to the success of these articles and incorporating a strong B2B Lead Generation Strategy, we enhanced the number of businesses using Simon Baynes Wholesale as their preferred food and drink supplier.
Our PR feature gave us a platform to showcase their family values and passion to supply quality fresh produce. The initial features led to further opportunities including on radio and television which doubled their lead growth.
To read the Yorkshire Post article in full, click here
The Island celebrates ten years as a charity
The Island is one of our long-term clients who we adore working with. They are a local children’s charity that provides mentoring services for children and young people struggling with their mental, emotional and/or social wellbeing.
2018 marked ten years since the charity was formed and we wanted to use this occasion to generate more public and business support. Working alongside The Island team, we secured the Marriott Hotel on Tadcaster Road and were able to get Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York to attend the event. The event took over nine months of careful planning, however, it was a huge success and saw a wide range of people and businesses come from all over the country to celebrate what The Island had achieved over ten years and to look to the future. During the event and the weeks which followed, we secured long-term investments from businesses and received a huge increase in people coming forward to mentor a vulnerable child. This saw our waiting list numbers drop from 125 to 41 which has really made a huge difference to the children who use our services to transform their quality of life.
The biggest number of band applications for York's Little Festival of Live Music
York’s Little Festival of Live Music’s last event in 2018 was a huge success and over 800 musicians and bands applied to perform at the festival despite there being only 28 slots. Driving large numbers of quality applications for the festival was essential for the event as they were keen to put on their best festival yet before having a break from music festivals until 2020.
We drove applications to the festival through generating a social media campaign which targeted bands and musicians predominantly in the Yorkshire area. One of our biggest successes was that one of our organic posts reached over 60,000 people in two days which made a huge difference to the number of applications received. We also wrote several media releases and circulated these to the local, regional and national press. Our media releases were published in several publications including The Guardian, Yorkshire Post, Yorkshire Living, Northern Echo and numerous live music websites.
Our Facebook Functionality Workshop is a huge success
One of our main aims during 2018 was to look at providing social media workshops to small businesses. From our market research, we found that many small businesses did not really understand how to use Facebook correctly, therefore our objective was to create a Facebook Workshop which would look at the functionality of FB in greater detail.
Once the course had been written up we sent it to several qualified Social Media Professionals for them to vet the course to ensure it was of good quality and was easily understandable. We received a lot of praise from our peers and then tested the workshop on 20 businesses in September 2018.
The feedback we received from the course included:
“I went along to Ellen’s Facebook Functionality Workshop, and WOW, she gave us so much information, and countless hints and tips. I came away with 7 pages of notes! Thank you so much Ellen, we’re already putting some of those golden nuggets of information into place.”
Inc Dot Printing
As a professional coach at We Are Coaching, the Coaching is what we do well! Marketing & FB on the other hand…🙈!! So we knew we needed to get the business on fb & attended Ellen’s FB Functionality workshop. Packed full of information and tips, we have already created the page & are armed with lots of knowledge on how to develop the page further so we can expand our reach & continue to deliver value to our clients. You don’t need to be a techy person to understand it…Ellen explains things simply & with humour. Enjoyable & informative training which I’m glad I attended. Thank you.
We Are Coaching
From this, we made further tweaks and are now going to market with our new workshop. We’re currently looking to bring in Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn courses which are due to be tested in late 2019.
Joining forces with Ripon Races
One of our proudest achievements during 2018 was securing a contract with Ripon Races. Ripon Races is a family-friendly venue that is well-known for being Yorkshire’s Garden Racecourse. We are offering the team additional support with their Marketing, PR and Social Media projects and throughout the last year, they have generated many successes, including winning and being shortlisted for several awards, enhancing footfall to the racecourse as well as continually striving to be a fully inclusive venue for all to enjoy. We are really excited about what the team has planned for 2019, including their Five Friday event in May, which will feature 90s boyband Five….. we better get practising those dance moves!
2019 is looking to be a bright year for the Little Seed Group and our aim is to continue offering exceptional and flexible services for all our clients. We are really excited about further enhancing our consultancy, coaching and workshop services which should be in full swing in late 2019. If you have any questions are fancy a natter, then please do get in touch by clicking here.
