Keeping it Brummie

The term Brummie comes from the 17th-century name for our city, Brummagem, which was a slang term for counterfeiters. And although we may not identify with the origin of the term, we proudly identify with what it is to be a Brummie today. The term is synonymous with being friendly, approachable, and always up for a laugh!

Here are some of our latest endeavours to put Birmingham on the map:

Our very own Marketing Director, Kirstie Smith, has been a long-standing lecturer at Birmingham City University and has kept important ties to our city’s second University. Our agency has been going through huge growth, and part of this has been taking on three students (including myself) from the University’s digital marketing fast-track course. 

“It’s so important for us to champion young talent at Cake and it’s proven a great asset to the company as we welcome new experiences, knowledge and insight to the agency.” – Chris, Cake Founder.

Find out more about our journey from Birmingham-based students to agency life over at Business Live.

The three of us recently reconnected with our academic roots, taking part in BCU’s recent ‘Coffee Lounge’ initiative, where we shared our experiences with the current students on the Graphic Design, Photography, and Digital marketing courses. Personally, I would have loved to have had this opportunity as a student – to see real routes into the industry and be able to ask questions from real-life examples of how to get your foot in the door (and stay in the door!). I am very glad that BCU is regularly hosting such an inspiring event.

We love to share the love at Cake, and part of that is sharing our knowledge with young talent in Birmingham. We’ve had the opportunity to share more specific and applicable knowledge, through guest lecturing. Our SEO specialist, Autumn, lectured on the Digital Marketing BA(Hons) course at BCU this month. The students were super engaged with her lesson on SEO and it was a huge success. There is so much to learn in the world of Digital that it’s so hard to get it all from one course, and so I know (from experience) that this insight would’ve been greatly welcomed.

We’re very proud of our connection with BCU, and are looking forward to seeing where it goes!

This month, we saw the return of GirlCode! The vision and mission of GirlCode has always been to help women in digital. They also excitedly rebranded this year to deliver events that look and sound how they feel—disruptive, honest, and passionate about breaking down barriers. With various lockdowns GirlCode has been on an unfortunate hiatus for a while but the sentiment has never gone away and they’ve struggled to get their events back on. After 2 long years, we made it happen, with 3 guest speakers and lots of snacks (and booze), GirlCode was a huge success.

Hosting events in our Jewellery Quarter office has always been extremely important to us, as well as empowering female leaders in the digital world, and so it was an absolute delight to reconnect with Brummie women (and men) through this Galentine’s get-together. GirlCode will be back, so keep your ear to the ground… or if that’s too hard, keep an eye on the Meetup group or their socials!

I’m sure, if you’ve heard about Cake, you’ve also heard about Social Circle. Well, we won’t stop banging on about it because it’s so bloody good. SocialCircle is a monthly get-together founded by three of our team members, Kirstie Smith, Katie Underwood, and Katie Mellers-Hill and is now co-hosted with Sally Hawkesford from SHC Digital. Being able to connect with other Birmingham-based agencies is another way that we stay connected to our city, and share knowledge with our community. This month, we saw a HUGE turnout that led to us running out of chairs (and pizza). We’ll be better prepared next time!

Why is it so popular? Well, the Social Circle team covers everything social (surprise!), from upcoming innovations, cool campaigns, and everything in-between. Social Circle was born from monthly get-togethers between friends, where the Social Circle team wanted to gather round with a few drinks and chat about the latest in social media marketing. They wanted to be better for themselves, for their clients, and because they just really love social media. Hosting the monthly event allows the Cake team to meet like-minded Brummies that are looking to get social, and get inspired. Get down to next month’s Social Circle to meet the team, and learn lots about the industry.

Next month, it will be hosted at 1000 Trades, our local. Just another way we’re helping local businesses!

We love Birmingham’s vast and rich history, and we love being part of a city that boasts some of the greatest arts exports in the world, so working with Birmingham Museums is one of our proudest collaborations.

The Birmingham Museums shop exists to support Birmingham Museums Trust, preserving their collections for countless future generations with sales of their unique Birmingham-inspired items. When Birmingham Museums closed due to the pandemic, they needed to preserve their magnificent collections. It was time to modernise their online shop for lovers of Birmingham, art and culture, no matter where they were.

Through a series of collaborative workshops, we built their brand foundations, taking the time to understand the mission and vision that drove their work and the values that run through everything they do.

Alongside this, we discovered and refined their audience personas, keeping in mind that they also wanted to reach a new, younger audience outside of the existing museum-goers. This included mapping out the optimised customer journey these people would take through the online shop.

We then got to work on building a modern, stylish website that portrayed the quality within each item. The website highlights important aspects of the online shop, from their mission to support Birmingham Museums Trust to their love of local makers.

Our year-long marketing plan allowed Birmingham’s past to inspire us into the future with marketing strategies and tactics that keep new and existing customers coming to the online shop for one-of-a-kind gift ideas.

Another project we’ve been working on this month is a brand new app for Birmingham Wine Weekend. The experience is going completely digital, with the app providing a Wine Pass function: a personalised wine passport and key (QR code) to the attendee’s grape adventure!

It will also help take the Wine Weekend experience to new levels, using interactive functionality that will include tasting notes for every wine being showcased as part of the festival, as well as rate the wines you’ve tasted and save your own comments on each. There will also be state of the art geo-location interactive features that will help you to read up on all the participating venues, bookmark the special places you want to visit, and then navigate the festival to make the most of experiencing Birmingham’s city,

We’re super excited about our app-development work with Birmingham Wine Weekend, and can’t wait to show the final product to any of our wine-loving readers!

Keep an eye out on their website if you’re interested!