Hallam has been named Best B2B Agency at the UK Agency Awards 2026. We also won Best Culture Transformation Initiative, and took silver for Best PPC Campaign. A week prior we took silver for Best LLM Adoption and Integration by an Agency at the Global Search Awards.
The B2B title is the one we wanted most. In October 2025 we repositioned as a B2B specialist, and a year on, it’s fantastic to get recognition for the work that got us here. Here’s what the judges were looking at, and the work behind each award.
Best B2B Agency
Around 80% of our clients already worked in complex B2B markets, and that was where our best results kept coming from. The decision followed a rocky 2024, when two large SaaS clients restructured within weeks of each other and 15% of our turnover disappeared in two months. We could have cut back and waited but we narrowed our focus instead.
The numbers from 2025 suggest it worked. Turnover steadied and we achieved our new business target, signing 18 new B2B clients and winning 42% of the pitches we entered. Across our B2B portfolio, KPIs improved by 17% on average and 70% of clients saw significant lead growth.
Two clients show what that looks like day to day. Fora merged two brands, Fora and The Office Group, just prior to our campaign work. We ran DOOH, YouTube, display, paid social and Performance Max under one idea and smashed our sales qualified lead target Fora’s share of search overtook Regus for the first time. For Holcim, we handled the move from Aggregate Industries through an 18-brand acquisition, and our integrated approach to Search meant lead targets were met whilst organic traffic recovered.
We’ve also built our own tools. Elements scores a B2B brand on brand, reach, experience and data, and ties that score to pipeline. Share of LLM tracks how often a brand turns up in the LLMs, from ChatGPT and Gemini.
And we launched Better B2B from nothing in 2025. The community for B2B marketers passed 500 members within six months, and when we ran Better B2B North and South in Manchester and London, the profits went to the charity Mind.
Best Culture Transformation Initiative: giving the agency to the team
In summer 2025, the people who owned Hallam handed it to the people who work here. All of the agency’s shares moved into an Employee Ownership Trust, which makes every member of the team a beneficial owner.
The founders and leadership shareholders, including Susan Hallam, who started the agency in Nottingham in 1999, could have sold to a trade buyer or a private equity firm. They chose not to.
It comes with proper governance. A Trading Board chaired by Maria Vardy looks after commercial strategy. An EOT Board chaired by Chris Simpson includes two employee representatives, elected by the team. We already shared profit and loss with everyone at the agency. Now everyone also has a stake in it.
The decision grew out of values we’d held for years. Hallam repositioned around a “business can be better” ethos in 2022, became a B Corp, and kept that certification this year. The Nottingham Digital Summit has now raised more than £100,000 for local charities across six events, including over £17,000 for Rainbows Children’s Hospice in 2025.
People stay at Hallam. A third of the team has been here for five years or more, and 58% for three or more, which is unusual in an industry where people move on quickly. Our clients feel the difference too, because the people doing the work now share in the outcome.
Silver, Best PPC Campaign: Infodesk
Infodesk sells regulatory intelligence software to pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. Its buyers are regulatory affairs and compliance professionals, often the only person in their company with that job, spread across more than ten countries. There aren’t many of them and they’re hard to find.
Before any ads ran, we built the brand from research through to a rebuilt website, and gave Infodesk a category to own: intelligence activation, with the line “Intelligence. Activated.” The campaign grew from that.
Our main insight was that this audience rarely responds to standard PPC tactics. When they’re ready to buy, they search for Infodesk by name, so search catches existing demand and the real work is creating it. Around 70% of the budget went to LinkedIn: a one-minute brand video at the top, thought leader ads built on posts from Infodesk’s EVP of Global Sales, Roger Kruger, in the middle, and lead generation ads for anyone who’d watched at least 75% of the video.
The most distinctive piece was in Baltimore. Infodesk was sponsoring the RAPS conference there in March 2026, so we invested in digital out-of-home ads within 5km of the venue. They picked up more than 550,000 impressions, and StackAdapt has since asked us for a case study.
Between January and April 2026 the campaign generated 3X the marketing qualified leads we were targeted with. Brand search rose 53% year on year after the new brand went live.
Silver, Best LLM Adoption and Integration by an Agency
This one went to the Global Search Awards. In 2025 we stopped treating AI as a side project and started building it into how the agency runs.
The clearest example is measurement. Search reports give you impressions and last clicks, and LLMs give you neither. So we built Share of LLM, which reports how often a client appears in the LLMs, topic by topic, with the same granularity as a search query report. It now appears in client board reports. Infodesk’s marketing director, Kathy Harvey, says it shows at a glance where they show up in LLMs and where they don’t.
The Third Eye reads client sitemaps every hour and uses Gemini to summarise any pages added or removed. For our retail client who has 12 shopping villages across several languages and sites, it ended manual checking, and the organic gains that followed were worth more than £20,000 in saved paid spend. We also scrape Reddit threads and use Gemini to spot questions people are starting to ask before they show up in keyword tools, which we wrote up in a guide to predictive SEO.
Our client Cabin Master reached the number one spot for citations in AI Overviews. Keywords that trigger those overviews improved 476% from the start of the work, and ChatGPT referrals rose 253% year on year.
Inside the agency, our leadership team recorded video walkthroughs of new AI workflows and an LLM turned them into written procedures, five times faster than writing them by hand. An internal Organic Guru GPT holds our organic search know-how and handles onboarding for new starters. A specialist reviews every AI-assisted client output before it goes out, and we log where an LLM was used.
Our CEO, Jake Third, has been vocal about what AI should and shouldn’t replace. “AI can’t replicate our ability to have soul, our ability to inspire, our ability to have hope,” he says.
Thank you
Awards are judged on a year of work, and that work belongs to the clients who trusted us with it and the entire Hallam team who now own the business. Thank you to Infodesk, Fora, Holcim and every client who gave us a hard brief and the room to answer it.
If you’re a B2B marketing leader weighing up agencies, we’d like to hear what you’re trying to fix. Get in touch, or be part of our wider B2B community at Better B2B.
