2021 brought many challenges and many opportunities to the team at Air Marketing.

While we navigated the end of lockdown like so many other businesses, we also found it to be the most successful year in our six year history.

Here is our review of 2021 and what we’re looking forward to as we move through 2022.

The challenges that 2021 brought

Like all businesses, we were hit hard by the pandemic. At the start of 2020, many of our clients were forced to furlough staff and cease operations temporarily, which had a knock-on effect on the services we provide.

We’re not ashamed to say we lost revenue, as did many other businesses across the UK.

As the world started to open up once more during 2021, things began to improve. Admittedly, some clients were tentative, especially as new strains of COVID-19 started to emerge.

Despite this, our revenue grew more than 100% during 2021. This is not only a testament to the faith our clients put in us, but the hard work of our team.

Another challenge that 2021 brought was getting our team back to the office. When COVID-19 emerged, we immediately introduced home working to keep our team safe.

As a sales company used to working in a lively office, we found this hard at first, but our staff quickly got used to doing things online. Daily calls and regular meetings helped us all stay connected, and we even took part in virtual fitness classes!

We’re now formalising a return to the office, offering hybrid working that provides our team with the best of both worlds. While working from home has been an interesting experience, nothing beats seeing your team in person.

We had our first full team day in November last year, the first one since the start of the pandemic. It was great to meet all the new starters and the team members we hadn’t seen for so long.

How Air Marketing grew during 2021

As you can see, there were some challenges we had to rise above last year. However, many other success stories helped grow our business and made us one of the UK’s most popular lead generation companies.

A refreshed look and feel

We rebranded our business at the start of 2021. As we had been using the same branding since we launched in 2016, we felt it was time for a refresh to accurately represent who we were in a new decade.

This rebrand helped guide us to promote the new services we could offer prospective customers, as well as highlight our years of experience in the industry.

The 2021 rebrand included:

• An updated logo and colour palette
• The launch of our brand new website
• The introduction of our ON AIR: With Owen interview video series, where our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards, interviews prolific names in the sales industry
• The creation of an Instagram account to complement our other social media channels

New contract wins

In 2021, we found many businesses enquiring about our services. As their sales and business development teams had suffered from the impact of COVID-19, they needed external support to help bring in new leads and opportunities.

One of our exciting new clients in 2021 was Perkbox, who wanted to outsource a part of their sales development team to our business. We also partnered with the Exeter Chiefs to help the sports team find new sponsors.

As well as new contract wins, we were delighted to continue working with our long-standing clients. We signed a new contract with Funding Circle, with whom we have partnered for the past five years.

More staff and increased responsibilities

When Air Marketing started in 2016, there were two staff members on the payroll. Fast forward to the start of 2022, and we now have over 80 people on our team.

As our business has grown, so has our need for exceptional employees. As well as more SDRs to help our clients fill their sales funnels, we created several new positions, including Commercial Director and Marketing Executive in 2021.

The staff already in our business have also stepped up, taking on more duties and progressing to more senior roles. We’re especially thankful to our team leaders, who have helped onboard new team members virtually during the past year.

As well as over 80 staff, we now have a complete senior management team responsible for growing the business and engineering change, for the first time in our history. Not only this, but we have a board that consists of an equal number of men and women. Given that full gender parity in the boardroom is estimated to be over 14 years away, we’re pleased to be ahead of the curve.

What we want to achieve in 2022

We’ve come a long way over the past year… and we’re not finished just yet!

We have an exciting 12 months of growth ahead of us. Here’s what we want to accomplish.

100 employees at the end of year

We want to increase the number of staff we have by the end of 2022 to over 100 people.

We’re especially interested in building up our in-house sales team, to help us achieve our target of £1m of growth and bring in even more prominent clients.

If you’d like to know more about the jobs we’re currently hiring for, why not visit our careers page?

High-quality onboarding for employees

We’re proud of our sales reps’ expertise, and we want to expand on this even further. This year we plan to launch our Air Marketing Academy, helping onboard new staff and improving their potential.

As we’ve discussed in previous articles, a thorough onboarding experience is imperative in boosting team morale, increasing revenue and job satisfaction.

Improving the maturity of our processes

During lockdown, we had to think on our feet and quickly implement many of our processes. We want to review our procedures now that we have more time and a full leadership team in place. This way, we can ensure they’re not only right for our business needs, but futureproofed for the years ahead.

If 2021 was about speed, we want 2022 to be about longevity and accuracy.

A more comprehensive array of services

When we started in 2016, we offered one service: telemarketing. Our portfolio of services has now grown, and we offer our customers a wholly outsourced sales and marketing solution, everything from event booking to multilingual sales.

In 2022, we aspire to move into SDR recruitment, helping businesses assess candidates and build their own high-performing sales teams in-house.

Want to learn more about the services we have planned over the next few months? Watch this space!

Of course, we do have even more exciting plans up our sleeves that we can’t wait to share with you soon! We hope you will follow us through 2022 to find out what we achieve. Follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for our newsletter to keep updated with all the latest Air Marketing news.