The History of Shaw Marketing Services in 10 Clients
Our story started in April 2008, when Georgina Shaw and Andy Turnbull set up a full service marketing and PR agency on the Costa del Sol, to help businesses communicate effectively and aquire more customers.
Ten years on and we’re going from strength to strength, but only because of the support and belief that our wonderful clients have shown us for so many years. We’ve had well over 100 clients during our 10 year history, who have all been fabulous. Some have marked important phases or moments in our development. So, we thought the best way to tell our stories was to highlight ten important clients who have really made our company the way it is today. Many of these we still work with today and others who we just have fond memories of, but were so vital for our growth.
This property management and rentals company was our very first client. Georgina met Gill Sidebottom while networking and we started working with them doing some copywriting, then PR, working very closely together for many years. Ten years on, we are still working together, writing the blogs for HomeCareontheWeb, HolidayRentalontheWeb and HomeRentalontheWeb. It’s wonderful to be able to still be working with this excellent company that started our exciting journey.
Specsavers was our first really big client, who we needed to pitch for against other agencies on the coast. After a long process, dealing with the Head Office in Guernsey, we won the business in 2010, and have been their PR representatives ever since. It was a really important moment for the company to have such a globally important company on our books. It also enabled us to build our press contacts in the Costa Blanca and Mallorca and start with PR in Spanish, as well as English. We are very proud to have been representing them for the last eight years and have had some amazing success. In March we completed a campaign to fundraise for the charity ONCE which generated over 35,000€ worth of PR coverage over a six month period.
We have been supporting this great environmental charity since 2011, offering free PR services to them to grow awareness of their work to the expat population on the Costa del Sol. This charity is very close to our hearts we and continue to help them to promote their events and have offered support with promoting their newest project Suerte de la Tierra.
In 2011, the Sales and Marketing Director of the iconic Marbella Club Hotel, offered Georgina a job as Communication Manager at the hotel, after finding her profile on LinkedIn. We managed to persuade them that they’d be better off using the agency rather than Georgina and we worked very successfully with them for two years. We wrote articles, managed the international PR agencies, managed their social media and blog. We also came up with and managed events to boost local visits to the outlets and were lucky enough to be involved with Pablo Hohenlohe’s Spring Games and Count Rudi’s 80th birthday. This was an intense but highly rewarding experience, and we are very proud to have worked alongside so many great people and helped tell the story of the original Marbella hotel.
As we set up shop during the crisis, we didn’t have a real estate client until 2014, when Georgina started training the team at Nordica Sales and Rentals. Our work with them quickly grew to involve PR for the launch of their property styling division, copywriting and design, newsletters and Instagram management. Nordica is such a lovely company, with a great bunch of people and it’s a real pleasure to work alongside them.
We were contracted as the outsourced marketing department of this prestigious international school in 2013. They used us to support them through a change of Headmaster, the opening of their boarding house and the drive for more primary students. It was fascinating to go behind the scenes in the school and we really enjoyed the passion for education that goes throughout the organisation. They decided to take the function back in house, after a year of working together, but we still support the school, taking part in their annual career convention and advising their students about careers in marketing. This client marked our move from Marbella to the western Costa del Sol and helped us to understand this new area and build contacts and awareness.
Between 2016 and 2017 we worked with the team behind the innovative coworking centre Our Space. Our team launched the centre through PR and grew awareness of the concept of coworking along the Costa del Sol. We had a highly successful press launch of the centre, built relationships between the main networking groups on the coast and later worked on event promotion for the regular seminars held at the office space. It was so great to be involved with bringing such an innovative concept to the Costa del Sol and I am pleased to say they are flourishing.
In 2016 we were thrilled to be approached by a leading London PR firm to collaborate on the launch of the prestigious real estate project Fontana in Sierra Blanca. After pitching against various other Costa del Sol marketing agencies, the team chose us as their partner and we worked together on a highly successful campaign. We organised a press conference in the Marbella Club and invited press to their glamourous launch party up on the site. It was a wonderful collaboration which resulted in over 50,000€ worth of press coverage.
Shaw Marketing Services was brought in during the summer of 2016 to support the team while the Marketing Manager was out on Maternity Leave and increase their PR capacity. Since then, we have been building awareness in different markets and media. We have been able to welcome some fantastic travel media and bloggers to the hotel and gain highly valuable coverage. Most recently, we have been working on the closing of the hotel for a major redesign at the end of last year and the reopening of the hotel and new outlets in February. We have been featured in the Diario Sur, Malaga Hoy, La Razon, Breaking Travel News and many more media outlets. We were recently named one of the hot hotel openings in the Telegraph Travel Website and the Sunday Telegraph. The Kempinski is such an important global brand and the Kempinski Hotel Bahia is the only one in Spain. It is a beautiful hotel and we are so proud to represent them and be able to support them with a new chapter in the hotel’s history, launching a new gastronomic hub at the hotel – El Paseo del Mar.
At the end of 2017 we started working with high-end organic skin care company Vestige Verdant. This was important for us in two ways, it was our first experience of the beauty industry and our first major campaign around influencer marketing. We selected a group of target media and bloggers, wrote compelling press releases and fact sheets and approached them to offer samples of the products. As a result, we had five beauty bloggers try and review the products. The brand was also featured in two articles about the best vegan skincare brands in hugely important national Spanish media Mujer Hoy and Telva.
This anniversary year we’ve welcomed some wonderful new clients in just a few short months and we’ll be telling you more about them very soon! We couldn’t mention all our amazing clients in this article, but we want to thank everyone who has ever put trust in us to represent them. We’re so lucky to have been able to learn about so many great businesses and meet so many lovely people. It is very rewarding for us to be able to help businesses through their communication challenges and get them to where they want to be. Thank you!
Anyone who would like us to support them with their marketing on the Costa del Sol, please contact us today.