A Retrospective Look Back at the Oxfordshire Business Awards

Over the last few weeks, we have been preparing for the OXBA Awards, making sure to find the right attire and continuously checking if there was going to be a cheese board. The event was held on the 17th June at the John Henry Brookes building in Oxford Brookes University and although we did not win the Syndicut Marketing Excellence award, we wanted to take a look back at the night and celebrate the other businesses involved with the awards!

All of the team have worked incredibly hard over the past 2 years on our campaign to position Urban Element as one Oxfordshire’s leading Digital Marketing Agencies, working tirelessly by improving our process to help our clients and our own marketing. We detailed what we have implemented into our own strategy in a recent blog post but we haven’t highlighted how it helped us to get to being a finalist for an OXBA Award.

Being Nominated for the Syndicut Marketing Excellence

An award is a big thing, it showcases our talent, dedication and perseverance to our work in the digital marketing industry. Being shortlisted and then to go on and be a finalist for an OXBA Award made all of us immensely proud.

We have worked hard over the past 2 years to help our business grow while helping our clients achieve their goals. Our hard work is paying off and this nomination proves that! 

Although we did not win, we were up against some tough competition! Both No Fluff Communications and Ridgefield Consulting were both strong competitors and congratulations to Ridgefield Consulting for winning!

The Last 2 Years

Natasha and the team at UE have worked hard over the last two years in many different ways to help position us as a leading Digital Marketing Agency with a particular specialism in Social Media Marketing. The company culture, values and systems & procedures have all evolved to allow UE to excel in this fast moving digital industry. 

Strategic recruitment, training and internal development have seen us grow to a digital savvy team of 10. With this in mind, we are always developing every person in the business.

From being invited to speak at Brighton SEO to local networking, public speaking and awards we have been fortunate enough to be able to showcase our vision.

A Fresh New Site

A new site design to further our visibility on the web went live in 2021 which included our insight posts, success stories and very detailed service pages to help the end user understand what we do as an agency.

With updated keyword research, we were able to refine our rankings to help improve visibility of our website which helped to increase social media marketing enquiries.

We’ve talked about rankings before but the redesign of the site helped push us into this new found digital era with responsive video on the home page and scroll animations on our success stories.

The Night of The OXBAs

We were seated with some amazing people from Grape Minds and The Gin To My Tonic at the awards and were so happy to see Grape Minds win the Bicester Village Retail Award! Michael Jelley’s (from Grape Minds) passion, knowledge and enthusiasm for wine became incredibly infectious with the table getting us through quite a few bottles.

It was an exciting night and we even caught up with our good friends and client Wellers Accountants over champagne and canapes. We also brought our ex-developer Lee along for the festivities! During the night, Bremner Rory who is a talented impressionist showcased his skills and comedy! 

The Oxfordshire Business Awards showcases businesses in Oxfordshire by recognising, rewarding and promoting the excellence of these companies. OXBA also had a charity event which was in support of One-Eighty. 

One-Eighty supports vulnerable young people and families across Oxfordshire, Bucks, Swindow and West London. Their vision is for every child to enjoy a positive and flourishing relationship with education. If you would like to donate, you can do so here!

Each award was named after its sponsor so we would like to thank the follow for such a great night:

• Bicester Village
• Business & Innovation Magazine
• CIS
• Hartwell
• Hays
• JACKfm
• NatWest
• Oxford Science Park
• Oxfordshire LEP
• Ridge and Partners
• RWK Goodman
• Shaw Gibbs
• Syndicut

Over 500 people took part in the event and we are lucky to have been in attendance! It was so incredibly inspiring to meet and talk with so many talented and remarkably passionate business professionals and we would like to congratulate all of the winners and finalists of all of the awards!

We may not have won this time but for next time, watch this space!

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