It’s an indulgence for us to take stock on the year that has just passed. A great exercise in celebrating achievement, ahead of the Christmas period and a well-earned rest for the entire team. So please do humour us as we reminisce on how 2025 shape took for the Destination Digital marketing team.
And if you are really curious, you can take a look through the following to gallop through a roundup of the brisk pace we’ve set in the past few years:
2025 was the year that Destination Digital Marketing turned 5! If you are able to do the maths, that means we were conceived in lockdown, (just like lots of IRL babies who also turned 5 this year!). It’s safe to say therefore, that we know you will believe us when we say it’s been quite the journey.
But this was half-way through the year and so much more happened before this… Read on.
The networking events we’ve been running since 2023 have become a firm fixture in local businesses’ calendars. 2025 was another great year for a varied speaker line-up that brought energy and knowledge to attendees of this group. It’s been great to meet so many new people and equally great to invite our 12 speakers who’ve been to share their knowledge. Thank you to our speakers this year Rachel Hayward, Rob Dawes, Nick Brand, Gary Knowles, Sonia Price, Campbell McLean, Carl Clulow, Lee Garnett, Lisa Tennant, Michelle Waters, and the folks at Business Peak District. It’s been a blast!
And if you are hungry for networking in the local area, you *just have* to check out this ‘Golden Triangle of Networking’ blog that gives you a veritable list of who’s who in networking in the East Midlands.
The team at Defib4Life are *so* passionate about heart health, about improving access to AEDs to assist people in cardiac arrest and about spreading the word on getting defibrillators into the community to help save lives. So we are equally chuffed to have welcomed the Defib4Life team on board this year to help with the full digital marketing mix for the brand. When we first met Michelle and Claire, it was just Michelle and Claire and the office dog, but the team has grown and grown and grown this year, so the tea round has got bigger, and the number of orders being picked and packed to get out of the door has increased multiple times over. We’re so glad to be here for the ride!
Much of what we do day-to-day is private – we can’t talk about it – and the Soil Acoustics project is one of those kinds of projects. We were finally able to lift the lid once the patent application had been secured, so we really started to put the pedal to the metal on spreading the word about the SAM (Soil Acoustics Meter) device when the confirmation was received. This is a world-first device, and everyone in agriculture, horticulture, conservation, ecology, farming and viticulture needs to hear about this (geddit?!). They’ve since been selling these devices across the world – each time a new order from a new country comes through, a new customs declarations form has to be navigated. But, hey? The price of success, right?
With our long-history of working with gardening and horticultural brands, and with our MD Debbie Porter also being a full member of the Garden Media Guild, it’s no surprise that one of the first fixtures in her calendar was to travel to the London Business Design Centre in Islington for Garden Press Event. It’s a chance to showcase your products to hundreds of visitors who are ALL in the gardening media in one form or another. So, if you are wondering how to catch the attentions of the gardening press, then get in touch with us and ask us for help!
This project took a number of months to bring to its culmination earlier in 2025 due to the complex and sophisticated database that lies underneath the relatively simple website design. This new website had to condense hundreds of pages that had gotten into quite a site architecture jumble, down to just seven section pages. That’s quite a lot of content to be accounted for! Underneath the bonnet of this website is a Hubspot Enterprise engine that runs this marketing CRM system across the many countries in the Weiss Technik group via a headless tech-stack. Database cleaning, field mapping and importing tens of thousands of records to enable the team to continue their day-to-day jobs without interruption made this a web design and build project that required German-technology precision to succeed with minimal snagging. So this website is not just good-looking, but it’s pretty smart too!
We’ve worked in the gardening industry for a long time, and we understand the rhythms of the gardening seasons. Commercially, the impact the weather and the seasons have on sales is not to be underestimated; gardening products are not FMCG products – so different rules apply! We were approached by the Tuin team to help pick apart their current operations, and to build a strategy around a solid base of Google Ads, Meta Ads, Bing Ads, content marketing and SEO… and the seasons! We have layered email marketing, CRM marketing automations, navigational restructure, social media and platform troubleshooting on top of this, to deliver a full-service interim marketing department for the UK team. The turnaround that has resulted has been a joy to behold 💚
Derbyshire Makes kicked off officially in February with a launch event at the newly completed C W Sellors showroom on the shores of Carsington Water. It was a magnificent building with stunning views… even if the exterior paving and landscaping wasn’t yet completed and we all had to tiptoe across a makeshift pallet pathway to cross the threshold. The Arts Derbyshire team were granted the contract to commission artists for the festival programme across the handful of main Derbyshire hubs, and so our job was to help them promote the programme to maximise footfall. A fun February evening to kick things off!
There is an art to working Google Ads accounts that requires a tenacious attention to detail, and a focus on crafting a robust campaign structure, as much as calculating results through increasingly difficult mathematical means. As 2025 has progressed, changes to cookies, consent mode, modelling advancements and tracking restrictions from browsers, devices and operating systems have made tracking results even harder. So we have had to spend a lot of time triangulating data to look for cause and effect metrics, now that regular dashboards have been rendered useless for this task. So for BGS, adding a strict CPA target experiment into the mix – to be executed across 4 accounts in 4 different languages, whilst also sharing budget priority across these four territories, but also across other performance platforms like Meta, Bing and AWIN – was quite the challenge!
When we partnered with Elysium Healthcare, this was not just a new client being onboarded, it was an old friend. Many, many, many years ago Debbie worked with an organisation called Lighthouse Healthcare, but this organisation was bought out by Elysium Healthcare, bringing this contract to a sad but unavoidable end. So it is thrilling to be asked to come back many years later to help out with SEO and the management of over 100 properties via Google My Business and Bing for Places.
There have been so many new flavours this year, that it’s all we can do to just list them, so here goes!
What do you like the sound of best?
If you missed Festivity, a travelling village of festival within festivals across the county, then you really did miss out! Kicking off at Bolsover Castle in May, and touring throughout the summer until culminating with the final outdoor festivals in September, this was a brilliant programme of entertainment that showcased dozens of local artists across a wide range of artforms. There is one more chance to see the final indoor event in February 2026 at the Winding Wheel in Chesterfield. So if you want a flavour of what’s been keeping the crowds entertained across the county in 2025, make some definite plans to attend!
We like to keep abreast of the latest in media and advertising, and so a trip to the ITV Showcase in the summer was just the perfect thing to allow us to find out about advancements in interactive digital TV ads, and new programming coming up for the channel. We also had a rather lovely day out in the heart of Manchester too, where the wines flowed and we chased the canapes around the room in the after-party!
We get most of our new business through word of mouth, which is a very fortunate position to be in, and we are humbly ever-grateful. The husband-and-wife team at Quirk were passed our details in exactly this way, from a client who had also been passed our way by another client. A beautiful chain of recommendation! And for anyone wanting to check out their website, if you are located in the Essex area you can see the beautiful home renovation and extension jobs they do too.
Another word-of-mouth opportunity came our way in the form of Melbourne Festival and the Creative Melbourne Gallery. In the cash-strapped arts sector, money is tight, so we wanted to give as much value as we could. It was a delight to workshop through brand alignment of the various component parts that make up the group under the CIC Arts Melbourne. And what a joy it has been to watch the team experiment with social media content. We’re continuing to cheer you on from the side-lines, folks!
Ed joined us in October 2023, and we’ve worked together to take him from fresh school-leaver status and give him a positive start in his career with skills he can now use lifelong. With a 15-month apprenticeship programme to work towards his qualification, we finally got the end point assessment out of the way at the start of the year, and then confirmation in the spring that he had passed with flying colours! Read about Ed’s reflection on his apprenticeship journey here, and join us in celebrating his achievements (again!).
Weiss Technik UK have been operational in this country for over 25 years, working across a wide range of industries, supporting product development, quality assurance and production testing for manufacturers. The solid reputation they have built made them the perfect choice for taking over DACTEC who looked after Weiss Technik’s Irish customer base. The UK team have since been busy strengthening their sale and service teams to service this new market and we’re here ready to cheer them on to even greater heights in 2026 🙌
We got a taste of the high-life in June when we headed to London on the early train to spend lunch at the House of Lords, courtesy of Adobe Express and Small Business Britain. The canapes and champagne flowed for three hours, and we left just a little bit tipsy to go onwards for lunch at The Ivy in Covent Garden, meandering our way past Westminster Abbey, 10 Downing Street, the Changing of the Guards and Trafalgar Square on the way. A chance to rest a little on our laurels and what a splendid day out it turned out to be!
The team at SPA Power Machinery are always thinking forwards and are always innovating to move with the times and to respond to new demands. With one eye on sustainability they’ve launched the EGO Battery powered versions of their popular Westermann WR870 Moss Brush and Westermann WKB430 Weed Ripper models to the UK market and got an almost immediate positive response when they showcased these models at GroundsFest this year. Winning ‘Best Landscape Machinery’ in the GroundsFest Innovation Awards is the most perfect way to launch a new product to market in our opinion!
We’ve worked on a number of Google Ads accounts now that have taken advantage of employing Producthero as a CSS Partner. If you have a Google Ads account and you don’t have a CSS in place to handle your ecommerce inventory, then let us tell you now that you are missing a trick!
We had 6 days to turn this one around. Never one to turn away from a challenge, we had to devise a way of presenting a screencast reliant presentation at the FSB Derby Boot Camp… but on paper only! …with 6 days’ notice! Cue, a furious session of digital tutorial making to create short form videos to get each teachable moment across to the audience… to then turn them all into blogs… to then turn these into QR codes… to then turn these into a printed handout… to then be used as an ‘at table’ visual aid for the presentation. Phew! We don’t want to do that again!
So here are those tutorials so that you can benefit from the fruits of our labours!
We’ve worked with Arts Derbyshire for almost two decades, and so know the arts sector in this county intimately. We’ve also worked with the tourist board in the Peak District on a number of occasions over the years too, as well as within the tourism and hospitality sector locally too, so we’re pretty well versed in both sectors. And so it was in this context the Debbie was asked to Chair the Arts Derbyshire New Horizons meeting in October, leading the conversation with Visit Peak District & Derbyshire’s Lindsay Rae, Chatsworth House’s Louise Shannon and Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust’s Jennifer Spencer.
As anyone who knows us will already be abundantly aware, we love gardening, we love the gardening media, we love plants in the garden, we love flowers in vases, we love indoor jungle plants lovingly nurtured indoors. How fantastic then to be able to welcome Plants For All Seasons on board? We’re helping them with their Google Ads management and have migrated them to the Product Hero platform to get right down to the nitty gritty of optimising their campaigns and the data that feeds into a healthy Google Ads account.
The team are always busy, and whilst they aren’t running around getting involved in so many activities across the country, they are also busy picking up awards!
MD Debbie is a Trustee for local charity S.H.E. UK and gets hands on with the marketing and promotional side of the organisation as part of her role. The Big Give Women & Girls Fund is one of the largest fundraising opportunities for the charity every year, and so she got to work making sure *everyone* was aware of the fundraiser during the fundraising week to help S.H.E. UK reach their £10,000 target. A lot of hard work and effort was put in by the whole team and they smashed the target with a day of the campaign left to go 😅
We’ve worked with Stretton Manor Barn since before they were Stretton Manor Barn. The brothers behind this rustic barn wedding venue in Derbyshire, formerly ran Tipi & Kata, a Mexican hat tipi wedding venue company. Aesthetics and brand are at the very forefront of every decision they make, and so it’s no surprise to find that this has won them the accolade of Best Barn Wedding Venue in the UK at the Wedding Industry Awards in both 2024 and 2025. They have added to their trophy cabinet the accolades of Best Events Team and Best Barn Wedding Venue in the East Midlands at The Wedding Industry Awards in November too! Bravo!
After a year of working with the Tuin UK team on improving their website’s organic standing as well turning around their performance marketing channels on Meta Ads, Google Ads and Bing Ads, we turned our attentions to what is the biggest single selling event for most brands… Black Friday.
Tuin’s new financial year started in October 2025, and so the Black November sale provided the single biggest opportunity to get them set on the right track for the upcoming financial year. We don’t mind bringing our light out from underneath the bushel to say that we absolutely smashed it this year! With an inarguable YOY revenue and ROAS improvement that would make any marketer give their heartfelt thanks to the marketing guardian angels above, we feel we’ve earned a glass of something bubbly in celebration for our efforts.
HECK are brilliant. There, we said it. We love working with this team and have been with them since year one, helping them broadcast all their brilliance to the world. Part of their brilliance is in trying things out where other food manufacturers would spend months and years agonising. Their agility is such that they are able to bring to market short-run special editions to match a mood, a food trend or emerging tastes. But this one – the Baked Bean Banger – was dreamed up by kids! The name HECK! is inspired by the Keeble-family motto of ‘what the HECK!’ and a desire to just try things out and see what happens, so they said, ‘what the heck?’ and brought the Baked Bean Banger to life. Making a little girl called Lola from their local Primary School very proud of herself!
2025 marks 5 years since the tragic death of Ben Godfrey, a local Superstock rider who was caught in an accident at Donington Park in 2020. GT Couriers were Ben’s sponsor allowing him to carry on in the sport he loved and so were right behind the Annual Memorial Fundraiser this June, getting busy raising funds for local grassroot sports organisations. Gone, but not forgotten, and an amazing legacy out of such a tragedy.
Debbie has been a volunteer for the Federation of Small Business for over 7 years, has worked with Arts Derbyshire for over 19 years and is a Trustee of a local charity by the name of SHE UK. She’s also worked with Visit Peak District & Derbyshire and Derbyshire County Council delivering digital marketing workshops in the county for small businesses of all shapes and sizes… so you might be able to form a picture of the passion she has for the local SME community and in giving back where she can!
We therefore had cause to celebrate in the autumn when Debbie joined the Board of Business Peak District to strengthen her bonds with local networks and to carry on volunteering her time for the greater good in the beautiful county of Derbyshire.
Who do we think needs to be awarded the title of Small Business of the Year 2025/26? Defib4Life of course! In our humble opinion, what they have achieved in a really short space of time is nothing short of breath-taking. Having worked our magic on their Google Ads accounts, brought together a comms plan and helped them work automations into their operations, we’ve helped them become more agile and importantly, to help them shout from their own rooftop to spread the word about this amazing local business. The awards are next year, but we’ve got everything crossed for the team until then.
We want to wish you all a very merry Christmas and an even merrier New Year. The team will be heading to Liverpool this year for the Christmas do, and we’re looking forward to spending a night out on the streets of this party town. See you all on the other side!
If you’d like to talk to us about this news piece, or you’d like help with digital marketing strategy, content marketing, SEO or anything else digital, please email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199.
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