St Elizabeth Hospice is a leading local charity which is dedicated to helping people live with progressive illnesses. In summer 2011 they expanded their service area to include Waveney and Great Yarmouth and called Spring in to help them tell the community about their services. After a successful launch, St Elizabeth Hospice came to Spring again a year later to create a ‘reminder’ campaign to keep them in the public’s mind.

Spring created leaflets and ads using photography of, and quotes from, real patients and nurses to communicate the care and support given by the St Elizabeth Hospice team. Spring ensured that imagery and messaging were applied consistently across a range of communications materials. The campaign included local press advertising, door drops and radio advertising which was supported by PR.

There’s been great feedback. We heard that the use of a photograph and case study of a young patient encouraged a teenager to seek support for a parent, and using a real nurse encouraged a referral from someone who had known the nurse in a previous palliative care role and trusted them.

The hospice saw a 50 per cent uplift in enquiries (by phone and email) and referrals over the two week campaign.

To mark the start of the year in which we will celebrate Benjamin Britten’s centenary, Spring has relaunched the ever-popular Suffolk Coast website.

New features include a subtle redesign to make more of the imagery and bring the site in line with current web style. We have introduced a clean sans-serif font in place of the previous newspaper style typography. We have also reduced the text content on landing pages, and increased the image-led calls to action.

The site’s identity has morphed from a summer to winter image of migrating geese, with a colour palette that evokes a big Suffolk winter sky.

Research into user journeys shows high demand for events information, so there are multiple routes into details of local happenings as well as clear signs of the site being kept very much up to date. Other heavy traffic areas are location articles, so again we have emphasised these in our layout and design.

‘Things we love’ is in keeping with visitors’ desire to see edited content – essentially, the best of the Suffolk Coast by those who know and love it best. The content of this section ranges from walks to shops, from recipes to attractions, giving visitors a flash guide to the region.

We have provided some neat short cuts – for example, a nifty little tool in the header bar summarises the weather in an appropriately conversational style, there’s a quick sign up to seasonal emailers, and visitors are given tabs to social media networks.

Spring’s content calendar for this site sees us creating three articles every week for the site, on subjects ranging from shopping to wildlife, local characters to unusual places to stay. This is the core of a site which is also populated by businesses and organisations located here, who tell us about their events, heritage and other matters of interest for us to edit and upload to the site.

The website was first launched three years ago as the digital home of a content strategy devised to engage an intelligent audience with an interest in the heritage, arts and culture of our area. This audience visits all year round, attracted as much by the Suffolk Coast’s quality food and drink offering, its landscape and lively events scene as by its beaches and big skies.

Spring’s consistent monitoring of visitor behaviour has led to regular redesigns as we maximise the site’s useability for its market. Essentially an on line encyclopedia of the area, the site has achieved a loyal following and often features across other channels including the BBC.

2012 has been an extraordinary year.

The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June gave Brits an opportunity to celebrate her 60th anniversary – and Grace Jones’s exceptional hula hoop skills – in a extension of the fervour created by last year’s royal wedding. This pride continued throughout Britain’s successful Olympics and Paralympics. We brought in a total of 63 golds, 61 silvers and 62 bronzes, stunned the world (and ourselves) with the vision of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony and Thomas Heatherwick’s extraordinary flame.

But I often think, as I enjoy the benefit of hindsight, that it’s great we can’t see into the future.

If someone had lifted a curtain on 2012 back in 2006, when Spring launched, and shown that we’d all – clients, peers and friends – be enmeshed in the third year of a biting recession, I suppose many of us might have postponed our plans. Whatever the size of business, whatever your position, however old your children, however big or small your home, whatever the capacity of your car’s fuel tank – it’s undeniable that we have all had it tough for the past three years.

Despite that, I have seen some businesses soar, geared up to thrive in any economic climate or flexible enough to reap the rewards of the difficult years. I’ve also seen some really good businesses collapse, usually because of cashflow crises caused by sluggish bill payers or their own clients’ businesses folding.

There’s no doubt at all that we’ve all had to sing a lot harder for our suppers.

Spring’s response to the recession, as the first waves of it hit back in 2009, was to dial up our delivery on strategy and campaign management. We restated our process to establish total equality between planning, creativity and application, and focused our work on extraordinary ideas that demonstrably deliver profit for our clients’ businesses. This is not about making any of the Springers’ lives easier, but does mean that we’ve minimised risk for all our clients in running with bold campaigns, and thus helped their businesses to grow – and in the process, our own.

As we near the end of 2012, our sixth full year of trading, I am pleased as Punch to report that we have seen 35% growth in the last year alone – testament to the willingness of our clients to run with our ideas, and the energy and skill of all the Springers, not to mention the advocacy of our supporters who have helped to spread our reputation across the east of England as we grow.

So, as is traditional at this time of year, I’d like to invite you to settle down with a cuppa and a festive pie to enjoy our summary of some of the highlights of Spring’s 2012.

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Spring has been invited to contribute to Key Note’s 2012 industry report on the use of Social Media by marketers.

Recent years have seen the popularity of social networking sites increase significantly, driven by increased Internet access and the rising popularity of Internet-connected mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

As a result, advertisers have been quick to tap into this area, and online advertising expenditure now outweighs that invested in television advertising.

Key Note’s investigation into social media marketing analyses the uptake of social networks by businesses, as well as current market trends and the ways in which social media can be used by organisations to promote and market their products and services.

The report also includes a virtual roundtable of opinion from experts in the field of marketing, including founder of Spring, Erika Clegg; which investigates the hands-on usage of social media by marketing agencies and other businesses seeking to use social networks and other social media to its full potential.

Questions include what Spring’s goals are in engaging with social media channels, the strengths and weaknesses of the medium, and its impact on sales. Our response concluded with the view: “social media is now very much part of the normal marketing mix.”

To celebrate the anticipated release of 007’s latest outing “Skyfall” on October 26th, and the 50th anniversary of the series, over the next two weeks we are dedicating the Bollinger site to James Bond.

Spring is working with the marketing team at Champagne Bollinger to bring a delighted audience the many faces of the man himself, his leading ladies, villains and, of course, the numerous cameo roles of Bollinger: The Official Champagne of James Bond.