Meet Jordan Bucknell, CEO of eCommerce Agency: Upbeat Marketing

Tell us about Upbeat Marketing – how did you start, and what markets do you serve?

 
Upbeat started because it was the worst year of the recession, and there were no jobs. So, I went door-knocking around Kingston upon Thames, trying to start up a business. It started out as a web design service – I had a bunch of friends who were web developers, and I found them work and then took a margin. And I continued that model for a few years, adding in additional services – marketing, consultancy, lead generation – as the business evolved.

But it wasn’t until 2015 that I established Upbeat as a proper, limited company, hiring employees rather than using contractors.
Today, we serve a core of three markets – direct to e-commerce, lead generation, and SAAS.
 

 

What makes Upbeat unique?

What makes us unique is the team culture and how we operate as a business. The fact that we have a very strong media buying and creative mix always stands out well. It is a crucial differentiator for new clients because we have a very good understanding of both areas and how they work together operationally, as well as how the two teams function together.

Our experience in performance marketing is also essential. This is not new to us – we understand the business model the client is trying to pursue, we understand the challenges that they have, and we know what we need to do to produce results.
 

How has Upbeat evolved over the last couple of years?

Like a lot of businesses, we’ve had to evolve to accommodate remote working, which has meant a lot of technical and process changes, adopting new tools, and changing the way that we function as an organisation.

We put a new team structure in place about 18 months ago, and that has worked well, improving organisation throughout.

And we’ve worked hard to improve our internal marketing, doubling down on the website and the blog, focusing our efforts on attracting new business.

What can we hope to see from Upbeat in the future?

We want to focus on the creative, to slowly start to widen our service offering and expand to other marketing activities to serve clients. And part of that will be to remain on top of the latest technology. Recently, we’ve been doing a whole bunch of team training within AI to make sure everybody can get up to scratch with what it is that they should be doing so we can continue to get great results for clients.

We’re also going to be focusing on growing both the team and client base – working to become bigger and better at what we do.