Fountain Partnership, a digital marketing agency based in Norwich with an additional office in Calgary, Canada, was named winner of the Medium Business of the Year award, sponsored by the Eastern Daily Press, at the Norfolk Business Awards 2022.
The business was started in 2009 by co-founders Rebecca Lewis Smith, Marcus Hemsley, Laura Jennings and Rob Morley. It originally began life as a copywriting agency, but quickly expanded its services into other aspects of digital marketing, all with a focus on delivering growth for clients.
Since then, Fountain has continued to grow, introducing new services such as social media advertising as well as data measurement and analytics to help clients understand what is working and what isn’t at every touchpoint of a campaign. This strategic approach has allowed the business to compete with some of the larger London-based agencies.
The business has also won two coveted Google Premier Partner Awards for Search Performance and Growing Businesses Online.
Managing director Alice Rose, who is a Norfolk native, has been with Fountain for just over 10 years.
"I joined the business as junior digital marketing consultant, fresh out of university,” she said, “I just heard about this great business that was a couple of years old and doing lovely things in Norwich and I wanted to be a part of it. I have worked my way through the business, becoming managing director in 2020.”
As someone who joined the company with no experience in marketing, Alice is proud to shout about the culture of learning and development that has been created at Fountain.
“Success for us comes in a range of ways, including taking on a graduate fresh from school and developing them so they have the skills needed to take them through their career with Fountain and beyond.
“We put a lot of effort into training our people,” she added. “We built our own learning management system last year and we have one person in the business dedicated to training the team.”
Alice said that Fountain is proud to be a Norwich business, investing in local office space and working closely with the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Norwich Business School, and the team were excited to see other local businesses thriving at the Norfolk Business Awards.
“To go to the awards and see so many people doing amazing things in the region – and to all be together and having a really nice time – was great.”
Alice added that winning the Medium Business of the Year award helped to solidify the great work that Fountain is doing.
“Sometimes you can be in your own bubble as a business, so it’s really good to get that external recognition and round of applause to say that, actually, we’re doing a really good thing, so let’s keep going on this journey.”
She’s hoping that the recognition from the award will help the business reach new clients, in particular those brand names that are really challenging the larger, well-known competitors, and that it will help Fountain continue to do the same.
“We’re pitching against these massive conglomerates all the time,” she said. “We’re coming in and saying ‘hey, we’re this agency from Norwich, and we can do it better.’ So, we really want to land a few of those big, exciting clients that will help us put our business on the map.”
For more information on Fountain Partnership, please visit www.fountainpartnership.co.uk
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