In the winter of 2018, Heue Digital came to be. As a digital marketing agency for tech, we specialise in branding, design, advertising and social media projects for apps, online-platforms, SaaSs, startups and more. We, Bijon Henry and Aaron Vale, first started working on Heue in early  2018, and it’s been an exciting journey developing it into what it is today.

Self Made Clothing: Where the partnership began

We both met in college, and decided to collaborate together on a project centered around fashion. We were both interested in business at the time, and a fashion related business seemed the most interesting of the ideas we had.

We created the clothing brand initially as a blog titled, ‘Self Made.’ Through our blog, we shared fashion related posts and art via a platform called Tumblr, with the intention of eventually expanding the blog to become the clothing brand we envisaged. It took about 2-3 months to reach a few thousand followers and then we made the switch.

After around 6 months of the creation of the blog, we’d sold over 150 clothing items from our first release, and within 8 months we’d racked up over 200,000 shares/likes across all the content we’d created and around 15,000 organic followers across Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter

However, we were still in college and due to a lack of time and a shift in our own interests we slowly lost the motivation we once had, and subsequently we decided to sell it as it was the best move for Self Made.

Bjion’s Story

Initially I’d started off as a graphic designer, and from there moved into web, branding and apps as a freelancer, working with companies like Churchill, Thomas Cook and Teletext.

In my second year of university, I signed up for a Google Top Black Talent competition. In this competition, we were split into groups and tasked with running the digital marketing for a local business for three months time. I won star-mentee and was pushed forward to apply for an internship with Google.

After  I was accepted, I interned  in Dublin for three months in the paid-advertising (AdWords) department at Google, and then began a full time position once I’d finished university. I stayed there for 18 months, but missed the excitement and challenges you experience when running your very own project or company.

Aaron’s Story

Following Self Made, I was still interested in fashion and so I worked on creating my own minimal-streetwear brand called AVALE Studios.

Whilst studying Law at university, I missed a sense of creativity and so began working for a London-based design agency, where I worked with brands like Adidas and Sony to learn more about design as a whole.

After several years at the agency, I – like Bjion, wanted more of a challenge and to be directly involved in the day-to-day runnings of a business. This is when Heue Digital was conceptualised.

Who is Heue?

Why the name?

The name ‘Heue’ is a play on the word ‘Hue’; we cover the whole spectrum of marketing services (similar to the hue of a colour) but we added the ‘e’ as a reference to the internet, as we deal in everything digital (think eBay or eCommerce for example).

Why only tech?

With the creation of Heue, we also wanted to focus  on working within an area in which we enjoy – that being tech. What we enjoy the most about the tech sector is the youthful, entrepreneurial spirit of the industry, the abundance of ideas, and how diverse and accessible it is. Not to mention, there are exciting times ahead for the tech industry, and we’d like to be sharing the journey of those working on the ‘next-big-thing’.

What is the inspiration behind the look?

We wanted to create a look that felt modern, professional and easy to digest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we were greatly influenced by the branding of Google and Apple. Both share a similar ethos in simple, clean and modern design, and we felt it mirrored what we wanted to achieve.

Our logo is simple, perhaps overly simple to some and lazy to others, but there is an underlying meaning to it. It references  the fact that we cover the whole spectrum of marketing services (which would mean a complete circle), but it is left incomplete because the final part of the circle is the client  themself. Upon collaborating with the client, both our team and the circle becomes complete.

Our  Website

As our services are a mixture between both strategic and creative services, it was important to find a balance between the two when designing the website. Most digital marketing agency websites which focus on strategic services feel a little grey and boring, and we didn’t think that  reflected who we are. However, creative agency websites have a bit too much artistic flare for our liking, and so we wanted to avoid that. As a result, we spent a lot of time designing and refining until we struck a balance that worked.

When communicating what we offer throughout the website, we wanted to focus on  4 services which directly contribute something unique to the customer’s journey-to-purchase:

• Advertising: Reach more customers (driving traffic to a website or app)
• Branding: Engage with more customers (build likeability for the brand)
• Websites and Apps: Convert more customers (guide them to business’s desired outcome)
• Social: Retain more customers (build loyalty and stay top of mind)

A lot of hard work went into the website. Across the website – from all our  service pages to the case studies pages – there’s around 30,000 words written from scratch, so about 150 A4 pages – and this excludes all the drafts which were discarded! What’s more, there are 7 brochures, collectively around 70 pages long, 5 e-books (5,000 words collectively), another 8 design demos, 12,000 words worth of articles and much, much more which is going to be published over the next 6 months.

Making the video

When creating the video for Heue, we wanted to explain the similarities between traditional marketing and digital marketing, and how the various elements within digital marketing all work together cohesively to contribute to business success, as they did in traditional marketing.

The other objective was to highlight our main value-proposition, which is that we create end-to-end marketing strategies, as we believe  the elements work better together with a consistent message throughout.

Ask us how we can help, start your journey

Whether you’re kickstarting your business or giving your marketing strategy a reboot, we’ll ensure your uniqueness is clear, your brand distinctive and your message consistent. We don’t need much information to start with, just tell us what you’re trying to achieve and we’ll figure out what’ll work best for you!