Fully Funded Business and Marketing Support in East Sussex

UPDATE – MID APRIL 2022 – The funding pot has been fully utilised – so this grant is now not available.

Free marketing support is available right now – not a marketing grant, but fully funded marketing support! You don’t pay out a penny at all.

You may have heard about SEBB (South East Business Boost) grant funding, where you pay upfront and get 30% of the cost of a project returned to you as a grant. Well SEBB also has a free marketing support fund too. It is just for East Sussex businesses that are small or medium sized (SME).

So you could be a really young start up or well established. You just need to fit the SME definition and be a business that has the potential to work smarter and grow. Ideally you want to increase turnover significantly and recruit staff later too.

And, importantly, you can’t have had SEBB funding before (grant or free support).

(SME definition – means less than 250 employees and and less than 50m Euros Turnover or less than 43 m Euros as a balance sheet total.)

What business and marketing support is available?

There are two options for gaining free marketing support:

Big Ambitions – if you’re a business owner with ideas about what you’d like to do to take your business forward, you can access 12 hours of free support from various specialists – including us for marketing! Three and a half hours will be used with a business adviser developing an outline growth plan, which you can follow with 8.5 hours fully funded 1-2-1 marketing support. We could help with strategy, implementing marketing activities and training.

Ready To Grow – if your business is less than 1 year old, you may be given the option to have time with an experienced business advisor to develop a plan, but then have 10 small group business workshops with subject matter experts over a 10 week period, instead of the 9 hours 1-2-1 support mentioned above. (Plus have access to some free masterclasses too!) You would join a group of other like-minded business owners and follow the 10 week programme together. See start dates for programmes over the next 18 months. We will be delivering a number of these workshops and masterclasses on marketing topics.

Charities – Charities may also be able to apply. But it’s likely you must have at least 80% of your income from business/trading activities to be eligible.

We’ve focused on the marketing side in this blog – but the other selected advisors approved to deliver this SEBB support, will cover:

• finance
• leadership
• crowdfunding
• product development
• sales
• brand
• exporting and
• HR.

So you could even have a combination of some marketing support with a few hours of advice from their specialist area too.

How do I get started?

Send us an email and we can arrange to have a quick chat about what support you are after if you wish…

Or simply just follow this link to book a short meeting with Gavin McWhirter or James Mackrill from Digital Islands!

They are both experienced business growth advisors.

You could soon be accessing 8.5 hours of free marketing support! Fingers crossed 🤞 If you’ve had SEBB funding before, unfortunately you will not be eligible to get it again.

Gavin has worked very hard to keep admin super simple, so there won’t be reams of forms to fill in and documents to submit.

Go for it!

Incase its helpful for any other business owner you know, there are several marketing funding grants available right now:

• SME’s in East Sussex, Kent and Essex can gain SEBB grants for up to 30% of the cost of a marketing project – read more
• If you’re a manufacturer there is also some dedicated marketing funding to cover 30% of a marketing project – find out more.
• If you sell eco/green-related products and services in East Sussex, Essex and Kent, there’s funding  specifically for you, read more.