REACHING a 25th anniversary is impressive for any business in any sector, but for a digital marketing agency, such a milestone suggests it’s been in the mix from the start.
The internet was in its infancy in 1993 and social media as we know it today was more a list of futuristic ‘maybes’ but SilverDisc has a vision that has been realised through its position as a leading full service digital marketing agency.
SilverDisc – so called because its first products were on compact disc – was founded by Alan Perkins, and he has been with the company every step of its journey over the past 25 years.
Those early products included some of the first forays into digital home shopping trials for the likes of Freemans Catalogue, Page and Moy travel agents and Barclays Online Banking. Later, CD products for HarperCollins, Letts and Pearson topped the WH Smith CDROM charts.
The first webserver was leased in 1994 and the first client one was built for publisher HarperCollins UK.
The launch of AltaVista in 1995 saw SilverDisc begin marketing clients’ websites on search engines – and this is where Alan’s vision for the future began to shape.
“As a programmer I could see how search engines and webmasters could work more closely together,” said Alan. “In the late 1990s I filed some patents around my ideas and started going to search engine shows with our patent-pending technology.
“I soon got talking to show organisers and, as a result, have ended up speaking at search marketing conferences all over the world for the past 20 years. At one of these conferences in 2001 I met Matt Cutts, then head of Google’s webspam, and Craig Silverstein, Google’s first employee and then-CTO. They invited me to work with them to write Google’s webmaster guidelines. This established SilverDisc’s reputation for high professional and ethical standards.”
Today, SilverDisc employs 20 people in Kettering and has a small technology division in Santiago, Chile. It is a Google Premier Partner, a Bing Select Partner and a founder member of the Northamptonshire Cyber Security Forum.
Much has changed in the digital marketing world since 1993 and SilverDisc now focuses on three things:
o Designing, building and creating content for websites that are fast, secure and offer a good user experience on all devices
o Marketing websites in all online channels – search, social, display and email
o Optimising websites, which means making them work better to deliver more to their owners and visitors.
Alan added: “It’s been a fantastic 25 years and I’m so proud of my team of experts and what we have achieved for our clients in Northamptonshire and around the world. As we enter the next 25 years, we will continue using technology to gain more recognition, growth and profit for our clients and their businesses.”