Loom in 2024 - our agency round up

Another year has come and gone – and what a year it’s been! 2024 has certainly had its ups and downs, with changing governments and economic instability keeping businesses on their toes. And while we at Loom have also felt the pressures, we’re proud of what we’ve achieved this year and have loved seeing client growth across our portfolio.

As always, we’ve stayed by our clients’ sides throughout the year, offering stability and consistency during a turbulent time. Our strategic and long-term thinking makes businesses’ digital marketing investments work harder and we’ve seen strong year-on-year growth for many of our clients. We’re now 15 years old and have been with some of our clients since day one, becoming an extension of their marketing teams and ensuring that their business is always in the spotlight.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in 2024. Read on full the full article, or use the links below:

New clients, new channels
New team members
Turning 15 years old
Becoming a b-corp
Our ever-evolving offering
Agency Life
Industry Updates
A look to 2025

New clients, new channels – same great results

We welcomed many new clients this year from various industries, such as education, transportation, insurance and e-commerce. We dove into each business, immersing ourselves in their respective sectors and producing spectacular results. If you follow us on socials and browsed our case studies, you would’ve seen some of our team’s great work throughout the year.

But it’s not just new clients we’re shouting about. Many of our clients have been with us for many years, and we’re still finding new ways to generate traffic and conversions. Whether they’ve introduced new channels to their marketing mix, launched new products or services, or expanded their target audiences, we’ve been testing, tracking and tweaking various work streams to achieve the results our clients want to see.

UNLOCKING GROWTH FOR clients

So, what has this work consisted of? Our long-standing client ForrestBrown took on a pillar content project, while Henchman made their television debut in which their signature tripod ladder is front and centre. We repurposed the advert for our paid campaigns, ensuring that audiences far and wide watched the story of ‘Man vs Hedge’.

We worked on an amazing six migration projects this year (including our own – more on this later), plus another planned for the first quarter of 2025. Our migration service is just one part of our SEO strategies, working closely with businesses and their developers to maintain and enhance current organic performance. A new website is an exciting opportunity to launch new ideas, shape overall messaging and refresh your brand. If you plan on giving your current site a makeover in 2025, we’d love to get involved – get in touch with Tommy and let’s see how we can help.

It’s also nice to see our clients want to know more about the tricks of the trade. We love sharing our marketing knowledge, and offer digital masterclasses for anyone wishing to expand their skills. GA4 was certainly on everyone’s minds this year, with our Data and Analytics expert Lukas providing training for clients needing a little extra help navigating the new platform.

We also gave SEO and content masterclasses, introducing clients to the world of organic search and helping them craft compelling content that resonates with both users and search engines.

WE STRENGTHENED OUR TEAM IN BRISTOL WITH FOUR NEW DIGITAL SPECIALISTS

We didn’t just welcome new clients this year. Loom has also expanded throughout the year, welcoming four new team members to our agency:

Lukas is our new Data and Analytics expert, supporting clients and the team with increasingly complex privacy tracking, analytics, conversion optimisation and much more. He’s helped take our clients from strength to strength, ensuring businesses are compliant finding opportunities through data.
Vikki joined the Paid Media pod at the start of the year, producing scroll-stopping ads across a variety of platforms. She’s created creative campaigns that have driven traffic and conversions for our clients. You may also recognise her from Instagram – she’s also the force behind our social media accounts.
Ina is another latest addition to our Paid Media team. She specialises in a multitude of platforms, from Google and Stackadapt to LinkedIn and TikTok. Ina has a keen eye for detail, continuously enhancing campaigns and watching our clients grow in the paid space.
Jon joined our Content pod in the second half of the year, bringing years of experience in copywriting, SEO, and journalism to Loom. He’s enjoyed immersing himself in our clients’ industries so far, balancing businesses’ branding guidelines with SEO and writing for web best practices.

That’s not all that happened amongst our team. Our marketing extraordinaire, valued member of the leadership team, Chief Happiness Officer, and agency culture guardian Vicky will rejoin Loom in Spring after welcoming her little one to the world – we’re very excited for her return!

Loom at 15

We celebrated our 15th birthday this year! We’ve certainly come a long way since rebranding from Digirank in 2019. With a team of 22, over 60 clients and a number of awards and memberships to our name, we’re proud of our growth and can’t wait to see what’s next in store. Read our birthday blog to find out more about how we’ve evolved as an agency.

To mark the occasion, we refreshed our brand, giving our logo a bit of a makeover and switching up our colour palette. But a rebrand is more than an aesthetic. We also revised our company values, workshopping what makes Loom, Loom while carving out our service offerings. Our new website perfectly captures who we are, from the work we do and results we bring to our charity goals and wonderful team. Learn more about our new look here.

B Corp certified

We’re proud to say that we’re now a B Corp agency. We’ve made it our mission to make a difference for the environment and local communities. The whole team is involved, taking time out of their days to support charities and organisations and raise money for causes that are close to us here at Loom.

In 2024, our activities included:

We donated 1% of profits to FareShare South West and Cots for Tots
We helped Support inHope with their tracking set up and answering any questions they have, with an audit planned for early next year
Took part in Bristol’s annual Break the Cycle charity bike ride – a 34-mile journey through beautiful countryside that raised money for local sports groups.

We’re also running the Great Loom Bake Off, with team members turning up each week with delicious baked goods for the judges. And while we may be a long way off a Hollywood handshake, we’re certainly proud of our team’s marvellous creations. Follow us on socials to see who we crown our winner!

Our service offering

We continue to evolve how we deliver our digital marketing services to best suit the industry and our clients’ businesses. This means looking beyond Google and incorporating a variety of channels into our strategies, launching a new Data service and reshaping our offerings.

Data is at the heart of everything we do, and our Data and Analytics service takes that one step further. With the spotlight growing on businesses and how they handle data, user behaviours changing and Google Analytics making it harder to report, we’re proud to have Lukas at the helm of our new offering. He’s been working closely with our clients to demystify the world of first-party data, track offline conversions and ensure you have a full picture of your users’ journeys.
And those user journeys are increasingly found across a multitude of platforms, getting and messier and more complex all the time. That’s why in 2024, we also brought a range of different channels to the forefront of our Paid Media service. We’re still a Google Premier Partner, but now we’re also experts in Microsoft, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Programmatic, Reddit and more. Each platform can benefit your business in many ways, depending on your goals and target audience. Talk to us if you’d like to add more platforms to your marketing mix.

Agency Life at Loom

We’re a people-led agency, so our calendars have been full of client events, industry events team socials and everything in between.

As a Premier Partner we were invited to a number of events at Google. Including The Google Marketing Live summit in May, where we got to hear from Google themselves about the latest updates and future trends to take note of. We also attended the Google EMEA Partner Summit 2024, returning to Dublin once again and reconnecting with other marketing agencies on what’s to come within the industry.
Our SEO and Content pod made their annual pilgrimages to BrightonSEO, where they got to learn more about the future of the industry and came away with plenty of tips and tricks for our clients. You can read about our April and October trips in more detail.
We’ve been working more closely with Stack Adapt this year, building our relationship with the platform over multiple events over the year.
Ina and Vikki also spent the day at TikTok HQ for their Agency Growth Summit. They got to learn more about the app’s algorithm, best practices and a handful of tips and tricks to apply to our own client strategies.
Our founder Nikki took a trip to the House of Lords with Agency Hackers, where she heard from other agency founders and stakeholders about what’s next for the industry. Over 100 agencies shared their wins and challenges, and Nikki came away with key insights into the year ahead.
Nikki also enjoyed the 15th Long Lunch at Tortworth Court—a gathering most extraordinary, where the intrepid minds of the South West’s creative and digital realms converge for a lavish long luncheon.
Our AI expert Tamas attended several thought-provoking AI events, gaining valuable insights into this rapidly evolving field. One event, led by The Rules of Engagement, delved into the intersection of AI in marketing and ethics, addressing critical issues like legislation, privacy, and bias while showcasing how to leverage current AI technologies effectively.

We love spending time with clients and immersing ourselves in their businesses – and this year was no exception. Our long-standing client Infinity Motorcycles hosted their annual surf day at Devon, while Permagard – one of our very first clients – and Loom enjoyed a meal, drinks and a few rounds of crazy golf (shoutout to our own Hugh for getting a hole in one!). Our resident Christmas elf Chloe paid a visit to Bath for Henchman’s Christmas photoshoot, where she spent the day running around collecting baubles and finding the perfect star for the tree.

And of course, let’s not forget our own Loom socials. We kicked off the year with playing Darts at Flight Club, and then in November, we travelled to Westonbirt Arboretum for a game of Hunted. We camouflaged ourselves in face paint (and mud) and participated in a number of team activities amongst the trees. Our team organised a Halloween film night, paired with pizza and spooky treats from our Bake Off.

And there’s more to come! Our Christmas social takes place on the 12th December, where we’ll be watching Home Alone at the cinema before heading off for a festive pizza. While this social did initiate a company-wide debate over the best Christmas film, we’re looking forward to marking the end of the year together.

A busy year for the marketing industry

We’re not the only business that’s been kept on its toes this year. 2024 has seen many updates and developments throughout the marketing world, with our teams adapting and tweaking current strategies to adapt.

A messier middle

As we’ve already mentioned, we’ve seen the rise of new platforms, such as Stackadapt and TikTok. Online journeys continuously become complex, marketers look to get in front of clients by diversifying channels – although Google does still have the lions share of the search market. This is reflected in the increasingly messier middle, where users turn to alternative platforms for their product research. TikTok has become an alternative search engine, Reddit searches are increasing (it’s now more popular than X) and consumers becoming more and more aware of the companies they’re buying from.

As marketers, our job is to untangle the consideration stage and create a clear route to conversion – but this can mean turning to new channels as a result. Our Paid Media team have pioneered with these channels, trialing and testing new ideas for our clients and making sure we’re reaching target audiences at all stages of the funnel.

Finding opportunities through first-party data

New user journeys require new ways of reporting. Data has been in the spotlight for much of 2024 as many of our clients industry changes like privacy, multi-channel strategies and GA4.

With Google once again delaying the decapritation of cookies, businesses have had a little more breathing room to prepare for the change. For many of our clients, this means capturing their first part data and ensuring their cookie banners are compliant with current legislation. We’ve assisted our clients through these changes while identifying new opportunities for traffic growth, helping them realise the opportunities that lie within privacy-centric marketing.

We’ve already mentioned our GA4 training, which has been another key element of our Data service. We helped our clients transition to the new Analytics last year, but it’s a complicated platform and, understandably, many may find it hard to adapt. Lukas offered training for our clients, helping them navigate their Analytics reports and gain full clarity of their marketing efforts.

The impact of AI

We can’t talk about industry updates without mentioning AI. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we work, from content generation to reporting to work processes. Across the business we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our services and the value we provide clients through AI. While tools continue to evolve, we’ve adapting our strategies to accommodate new search behaviours and features.

As users’ searches become increasingly nuanced, data becomes more difficult to gather, and user journeys become less linear, anual-built paid-media campaigns are starting to lose pace very quickly. Google’s AI solutions in ad platforms are essential for campaigns to perform. It’s increasingly becoming our job to work out how to make the AI algorithms work best for clients’ businesses.

SEO and Content has also seen the impact of artificial intelligence. You’ve likely noticed the AI Overviews that appear at the top of Google’s search results, pushing organic listings further down the page while encouraging zero-click searches. While this has been a learning curve, it hasn’t stopped us from achieving some strong results. This means that, depending on what you’re searching for, you might have seen our clients appearing at the top of those overviews.

It’s an exciting time for SEO – probably one of the biggest years for the industry in recent history. Ever-changing landscape of SERPs and AI-produced content has made the web busier and noisier than ever before. Core algorithm updates sent waves throughout the year, and the Google leak provided more insights that helped feed into our strategies. Our SEO and content strategies focus on long-term growth, so while 2024 has brought a lot of turbulence, we’re ready for whatever comes next.

Looking forward to 2025

Every year, we reflect on our progress and forecast what’s to come, but this year has felt different. There’s been a lot of change from all sides, with us all adapting to both economic and industry changes. But this hasn’t stopped us from producing fantastic results. That’s why we’re looking forward to 2025 – whatever it may bring.

There seems to have been no ‘normal’ year since Brexit. Every year has new surprises and challenges. The unpredictability makes it hard to run a business, and we’ve certainly seen that amongst our clients and also at Loom this year. We embrace the challenges facing businesses and marketers today and clients increasingly rely on us to think outside the box and give them the competitive edge. We’re looking forward to seeing what 2025 brings!

Karen, Director

As we sign off for Christmas, we’d like to take a moment to thank our clients, partners and wonderful team for all of their hard work this year. We couldn’t have achieved what we have without you.

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and New Year – see you in 2025!