My name is Tom Agnew and I’m the Founder of Brafton. I like to say that Brafton is what happens when a roomful of creative geniuses get their hands on killer marketing data.
To be honest, though, we’re rarely all in the same room anymore. It’s one of many facts of life when you’re part of a global marketing agency with teams all over the world. That, and some wild time-zone differences.
But I digress…!
Brafton’s Story Began with … Content
The idea of Brafton, a creative content marketing agency, started occupying more of my headspace around 2003. I was still living in England and working at a news marketing company. I began to notice that organic, online content we created for clients was ranking on Google and driving a lot of traffic to websites. This wasn’t the purpose of the content we were making, but it seemed like a powerful side effect of it.
That made me wonder: Is there a business model in this, maybe one where we can transform that traffic into a source of new business revenue for companies?
Today, that’s a rhetorical question. But in the early 2000s, it was a new and exciting frontier. So new and exciting, that a group of colleagues and I privately funded a brand new, creative content marketing agency. My collateral was my home in England.
And that’s how I ended up moving to Boston (drawn mainly by the wealth of talent churned out by universities) with my family, in 2008.
Brafton was born. Its cradle was a 10×10 utility office in Post Office Square.
See Also: JotCast – Brand Story by Eric Perchuk (Founder)
Growing into a Global Business
Within two years, Brafton became the largest privately-owned content marketing agency in North America, staffing all its creative talent in-house. It really happened that fast. As we acquired new clientele outside of the East Coast, we established offices in Chicago and San Francisco to better serve those regions.
From there, the biggest obstacle we faced was keeping up with how quickly the online environment changes. Websites got more sophisticated and multimedia and Google got smarter. We had to continually try to anticipate where the market was headed.
Content, and online marketing in general, also became multimedia and multi-channel. So we started expanding our services into video, website design, social media, email marketing, paid search, and basically every facet of omnichannel digital marketing.
In hindsight, being a business that was (and is) heavily reliant on inbound content marketing helped us stay ahead of the curve. Search advances and marketing sophistication impacted our own digital campaigns, which we maintained meticulously and elevated out of necessity. We always apply what we learn to our client offerings, and are always conducting research to stay ahead of the game.
And that has worked out for us. In 2019, we expanded to the UK, and to Australia. As it stands, we’re officially a global brand.
See Also: Tomedes – Brand Story by Ofer Tirosh (Founder and CEO)
What’s Next for Brafton?
Everything we do comes back to our mission: Help businesses succeed by providing the most impactful, creative, and scalable content marketing services and technology solutions to organizations across the globe. There are two parts of that statement that we’re laser-focused on at the moment.
The first is “technology solutions.”
We created a proprietary content marketing platform 5 years ago that made it easy for us to plan, produce and measure the performance of our content marketing campaigns in one place. We’ve switched most of our clients over to this platform, and they love it.
The next stage for us is to start offering The Brafton Platform as a standalone SaaS solution for marketers all over the world. So it’s basically taking this software we made and making it available to all companies who do digital marketing, not just the ones we’re working on content campaigns for. It’s really the only product of its kind, and we’re so excited about it.
The second area of focus for us is “… across the globe.”
Even before the pandemic, working from home was a big part of our culture and I think it’s an important part of our future. We have customers in more than a dozen countries, and we hope to start helping companies in even more countries around the world. I think our global, remote workforce is going to help us continue on that trajectory.
See Also: CiteMed – Brand Story by Ethan Drower (Co-Founder)
Otherwise — and to come full circle — I do have one other tentative goal: More in-person team summits. We have physical offices in multiple countries, but so many of our employees now work remotely. As much as I love working with geniuses from all over the world in that capacity, it would be nice to get more of them into an actual room together from time to time, at least for a few days, or a week.
Hopefully, that’s in the cards for 2022.
Editor’s Note: Do you have a compelling brand story? Want to get it published on our website for FREE? Send your pitch to Nick Cullen at editor@solutionsuggest.com.
