Aycliffe Business Park’s very own Baltic Apprenticeships is well-established across the UK as a specialist provider of tech and digital apprenticeships.
For the last 12 months they’ve been busy behind the scenes working on overhauling their marketing strategy and output with the help of business park neighbour, Thrive, a full-service marketing, web and design agency.
Baltic’s relationship with Thrive actually dates back further in history as they provided the agency with a digital marketing apprentice, Rachael Farley, in 2016, who remains at the company today as a full-time employee.
However, Baltic reached out to Thrive in 2018 enquiring about the agency’s specialism in content marketing strategy and HubSpot Agency Partner expertise.
The learning provider made the decision after some internal reviews recognised the need to shift from their existing ‘Baltic Training’ identity to the clearer ‘Baltic Apprenticeships’ that best reflects their organisation’s core service.
Brooke Urwin, marketing manager at Baltic Apprenticeships, said: “We initially spoke to Thrive about producing a content marketing strategy and supporting us with buyer persona creation, which was an amazing revelation for our organisation.
“From there, everything just snowballed into this fantastic new, all-singing, alldancing, website!”
The two companies have been working closely on the implementation of HubSpot’s comprehensive marketing capabilities and Thrive has walked Baltic through the inbound marketing methodology, providing lots of knowledge transfer to Baltic’s enthusiastic marketing team.
Thrive director Johnny Woods said: “A lot of organisations can view marketing as a ‘necessary evil’, so to work collaboratively with such a fantastic attitude has overhauled the whole process and made for the beginnings of a fantastic working partnership.
“It’s been brilliant as a business to offer lots of ‘knowledge transfer’ meaning that Baltic’s team are now well-prepared, with support waiting in the wings, to deliver a lot of their own in-house marketing activity – it’s the best way for such a proactive, innovative organisation.”
The marketing and sales teams at Baltic Apprenticeships are now implementing their new-found knowledge using
HubSpot’s marketing and sales platform, a comprehensive, automated tool perfect for proactive, resourceful companies such as Baltic, as well as producing masses of relevant, high-quality content to best suit their target customers – businesses that require apprentices – that can be uploaded as part of automated workflows, taking the extensive resource requirement usually needed in the marketing process.
Brooke added: “Over the last 12 months we have worked with Thrive to improve our inbound marketing strategy and to better position Baltic within the apprenticeship market, their team has gone above and beyond to help us with the Thriveability Plan and the development of our new website.
“No request has ever been too big or small and they continue to go out of their way to make sure we are happy and offer their support in any way they can.”
Baltic Apprenticeships hope their new website will be a powerful tool for both employers and apprentices to increase their knowledge of apprenticeships, as well as supporting the organisation’s brand values of change, heroic support and digital dedication.
Johnny added: “It’s been a delight working with Baltic through the HubSpot and inbound marketing phases – Brooke and her team have been so enthusiastic and proactive in making every step successful and acted upon.”
Both organisations are confident about their partnership and are looking forward to working collaboratively on other projects going forward.
Thrive is a digital marketing agency based at the Xcel Centre, specialising in branding, UI/UX design, web/app development and marketing services – www.thriveability.co.uk