2024 has been a year of significant change and challenge for businesses all over the UK. Despite these obstacles, at Blue Frontier we have continued to develop our services and improve our offerings to our clients, making ourselves more agile in an environment where adaptability is key. From the hard work to the celebratory, this year in review paints the full picture of what 2024 has looked like for Blue Frontier.
What challenges have we faced?
Across the country, businesses have been tightening investment whilst pushing for digitisation to protect themselves as best they can against continued economic turbulence, political shifts, and changing consumer habits. As a supplier to these businesses, we have been on the frontline of tackling these challenges and supporting our clients as they navigate the current environment.
This year, many clients have come to us with new requirements, new goals, and new pain points that we’ve needed to help them meet or overcome. In some cases, clients have looked to internalise their spending or take up a new direction, resulting in our teams taking on different, more consultation-based roles. We’ve also had many brand-new clients come to us in 2024, looking for new ways to meet their goals and a new partner to help them do this.
Disruption through technological advancement has been another significant challenge of 2024, as Artificial Intelligence has taken up a prominent role in our industry. With more and more businesses looking for ways to integrate AI to support their efficiency and financial goals, 2024 has been a crucial year for agencies like ours to either embrace and lead on this initiative or be left behind.
How have we met these challenges?
In 2024 we’ve invested in implementing new processes, new offerings, and new products to better support our clients and meet these new challenges head on.
By launching an internal Research & Development (R&D) initiative we are ensuring that we stay at the forefront of market shifts and technological advancements. Our current R&D projects include an AI focus, research, and implementation group, a dedicated push towards developing our Digital Transformation (DT) offerings, and developing new products to the benefit of both our clients and the wider market.
2024 has seen us make significant changes to our internal processes, integrating new technologies and adopting a responsible and appropriate use of AI to improve our efficiencies. For our clients, this has meant an increased capacity for operational transparency and organisation in our project and contract management, with more streamlined communications, greater opportunities for collaborative working, and crucially, a more efficient use of their budgets.
We’ve also explored opportunities for new partnerships to improve our outputs and suitability for working in certain sectors and in specific support areas. Amongst these has been a new partnership with the British Franchise Association (BFA), which means we are now better placed than ever before to support the unique requirements of franchise-structure businesses. 2024 has also seen us partner with both Brandwatch and Cision, allowing us to enhance our data driven services with consumer intelligence, market research, and improved Digital PR outreaching capabilities.
Our areas of service development in 2024
As part of our drive to increase our support capabilities for clients and enhance our business agility, we have focused on improving and expanding our service offerings in 2024.
H3: Market Research
We have established new market research capabilities this year, significantly improving our cross-service strategy and consultation offerings. This has allowed us to do more for our clients when it comes to researching trends, changes, sentiment, and more, towards their business, their competitors, and their market sector. Thanks to new tools at our disposal and increased expertise across our teams, we’ve launched new strategic services including Brand Audit & Strategy, Holistic Marketing Strategy, Market Insights & Reports, and Digital Transformation consultation.
With these new capabilities, we are better positioned to strategically guide and support our clients in all areas of their digital and business landscapes. As well as improving our strategic output for our clients, this area of service development has also allowed us to gain better insight into trends and changes in our own industry, bolstering our R&D efforts and supporting our own growth.
Product support
We have expanded and improved our capabilities for ongoing product support. From websites and applications through to MedTech and medical device integration, we’ve worked hard to ensure that our teams can provide full ongoing support for both new and legacy systems. Thanks to service development across multiple teams, and new more collaborative processes, we can offer product support in everything from regular updates and ongoing improvements to bug fixes, cybersecurity, hosting, and compliance testing.
These support services allow us to build long-term partnerships with our clients, seeing their digital projects through to completion and beyond. By keeping everything under one roof, our teams can be proactive in recommending ways to upgrade and improve the products we support, while our clients benefit from greater efficiency and a reduced need to coordinate things themselves.
Other new services and products
Elsewhere in the company, we have launched new highly demanded services to the benefits of our clients, including Influencer & Affiliate Marketing, Programmatic Advertising, and Digital PR. We have also focused on improving our capabilities for supporting the unique requirements of the retail sector, with R&D leading to enhanced development, SEO, and web services for eCommerce clients.
Our new base-theme website product for WordPress gives our clients the opportunity to have a modern, dynamic, and responsive website at a more budget-friendly price point and with faster turnarounds. Meanwhile our IT department’s licensing capabilities for Microsoft products and other core programmes helps save business valuable time and resources in setting up and maintaining their internal systems.
Across the board, R&D efforts combined with process revisions, new tools, and new team members have allowed us to improve the existing services we offer to clients. From design to development, technical support and digital marketing, the services we provide are more expansive with greater-quality output than ever before going into 2025.
Launching cobolt – our new creative studio
Back in 2023, our teams started thinking of ways to reach an untapped audience. At that time, the projects which allowed our team members the freedom to flex their creative wings were somewhat limited. Wanting to appeal to clients that primarily require highly capable, creative design and marketing services, provided us with a unique opportunity to move outside of the Blue Frontier brand.
Throughout 2023 we workshopped and developed a new Blue Frontier-owned creative studio, and in 2024 we launched cobolt. A curiously inquisitive creative studio, cobolt (no capital ‘c’, and two ‘o’s – we explain why on the website!) built from our talented Blue Frontier team, and with all the same capabilities, has been developed to appeal to a new, and more creative focussed, target market.
The creative services cobolt provides include branding, design, campaign marketing, video production, and much more. Whilst cobolt strives to deliver work that is highly creative and unique, the studio keeps Blue Frontier’s core values at its heart, including being fundamentally driven by insight, data, and strategy.
If you’d like to find out more about cobolt, then take a look at our website.
Launching Resolute – our dedicated cybersecurity offering
By the end of 2023, we’d also noticed a significant increase in demand for cyber security services. Following a stream of high-profile security breaches for global and UK-based businesses throughout 2020-2023, our team identified that cyber security was becoming a growing priority for many organisations and that need was only increasing.
At Blue Frontier we offer over 100 individual services, including cyber security. But while this was something we already provided for clients (and have been since 2018), we could see the demand was there for our cyber security offering to stand as a focussed specialism. By giving our cyber team the opportunity to develop their own sub-brand within Blue Frontier, we could bring our cyber security offering to the forefront without compromising on the visibility or awareness of other Blue Frontier services. This also gave us an opportunity to develop a brand which aligned with a more specific target audience and digital service area.
Following months of internal workshopping, design, and development, we launched our Resolute brand in Spring 2024. Resolute is a dedicated cyber security brand which aims to bring an added touch of friendliness, approachability and transparency to the cyber sector. Like cobolt, Resolute benefits from the same Blue Frontier team operating in the background, giving their clients access to developers and technical support teams who can carry out complex cyber security tasks all under one roof.
If you’d like to know more about Resolute, then visit our website.
Blue Frontier’s focus in 2024
2024 has undoubtedly been a year filled with challenges not just for Blue Frontier, but for practically every business in the UK. In the face of this, our focus in the past year has been to improve our agility and invest in improving our offering, so that in 2025 we can turn our head towards growth. Our other focus has been to support our clients through their own 2024 business challenges, by helping them to improve their efficiencies, maximise their budgets, and meet their own goals.
In both of these areas we have been successful. While financial growth for 2024 has been challenging, as has been the case for so many other businesses, we have certainly not been idle. 2024 has seen us launch new services, establish new partnerships, and land some of our biggest contracts and projects to date. We can also say with confidence that we are proud of the service we have delivered to our clients this year. Having achieved a 98% client retention rate in 2024, we can go into 2025 knowing that we have supported our clients in meeting their goals for this year, and are even better positioned to exceed their goals next year.
Another priority has always been to maintain our role as a stable employer for our team members. Despite the growing rates of unemployment in the market, we are exceptionally proud to have continued growing our teams by bringing new members into our ranks and providing the same development opportunities as we would strive to in a more positive economic climate. We firmly believe that by continuing to invest in growing and developing our team members in these unprecedented times we have tapped into some of the country’s best digital talent, making us stronger than we’ve ever been before.
A statement from James Fry, Managing Director at Blue Frontier:
It is a fact of running any business, that there are times when you are negatively affected by elements outside of your control, and this has certainly been the case in 2024. But as the saying goes – ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ – and we have most certainly done that. I cannot express how proud I am of this team, and of what we have been able to achieve in the face of adversity, and I cannot wait for 2025, because I am certain it will be a year when we see true value in the effort we have made to get here.
Our goals for 2025
2025 is the year we look towards growth. Starting the year off with the launch of a brand-new Blue Frontier website, accompanied by a fresh and modern new look for our brand, we are set to reach wider audiences, grow our brand presence, and begin reaping the rewards of all the internal developments we’ve put in place in 2024.
Launching a new growth strategy
In 2025 we are setting ourselves up for growth with a new internal marketing strategy that focuses on providing our target audiences with more high-value content than we have ever done before. With a plan of action to increase our content marketing activities, establish new funnels for our prospective audiences, and tap into more, new audiences from different sectors and business types, we’re excited for the growth opportunities our new strategy holds for us.
Continuing to develop new services
Whilst we’re intending to push for growth in 2025, we also want to continue expanding our agility and breadth of services. With new R&D projects already underway, and with plans to launch more, we are expecting to be able to deliver new and exciting services for our clients over the next year. Areas we are looking to improve our offerings or expand into include services for generative search, portal development, AI application development, and more.
Becoming the next digital thought leaders
We’re intending to make our mark in 2025 with new unique market data, whitepaper reports, and other forms of thought leadership content. With a huge variety of in-depth knowledge and expertise amongst our internal teams, we are keen to show the wider world the value of our specialists’ insights. Whether it’s new market research for a specific sector, or educational content for digital marketers, we are aiming to bring something valuable to individuals in every industry in 2025.
Celebrating 20 years of Blue Frontier
2025 signals Blue Frontier’s 20-year anniversary! A huge milestone for us, we are planning to celebrate this occasion with a dedicated campaign that will run throughout the year. In addition to our regular activities, we will be taking a look back at everything we have achieved in 20 years, whilst continuing to push for growth as we move into the next phase of our business. We will also be giving more back to our communities to honour the local grassroots of our company, as we seek to empower the next up-and-comers in digital talent.
Keep up to date with us in 2025
2025 is sure to be a busy year for Blue Frontier. If you’d like to keep up to date with everything we have going on in terms of service development, company news, insightful content, or our 20-year anniversary celebrations, then be sure to connect with us on social media or sign up to our mailing list!
