Samphire Marketing and Web Ltd

"I have used Sam many times over the years. She is extremely knowledgable on all aspects of marketing and web design plus she is very approachable, listens to what you need and has loads of ideas and good advice."

"We have worked with Samphire Marketing for several years now. It always feels Sam is an integral part of our business and team due to her understanding and in-depth knowledge of our industry, products and staff, all developed since working with Forms Plus. Sam is extremely responsive and committed to enhancing our SEO. All of our SEO, PPC, Blogs and e-Shots are dealt with by Sam. We are supplied with informative reports monthly. We could not recommend her highly enough to any businesses."

"We worked with Sam for a year on our clothing brand Divesangha. We were very happy with her guidance, expertise and support. She's organised, extremely reliable and knowledgeable, but more importantly she really cares. From setting up a whole marketing campaign to fine tuning and optimising a website, we would definitely recommend Sam as a top marketing professional."

"I spent well over £5000 with Sam to build me a website, to a very clear brief I had given her with my marketing plan, objectives and strategy. Including several face to face meetings to discuss. I wanted a website that would be able to accommodate all of these plus grow with the business. Part of the reason I chose Sam to build the site is that she positions herself as a marketer as well, so I therefore assumed she would have even more knowledge and understanding about what I needed, with this additional perspective. The site launched in early 2020, sadly it became obvious very quickly that the site was not capable of what I needed or had asked for and to say Sam was unhelpful about this is an understatement. She made it very clear that any issues I now had were mine, she was rude and dismissive, saying she had built what I had asked for (she hadn’t) and unless I wanted to pay her even more money to sort them out there was nothing more she could do. The website I am left with is so restrictive that from a marketing point of view, it really has had a detrimental effect on what I can do with the site and therefore my business. Which has cost me so much in extra time, money and stress. As Sam positions herself as a marketer as well as a web developer I find this equally worrying. But it is also why I put my faith and trust into her. Sadly I have been burnt very badly. Fast forward 18 months and the issues continue. My business is evolving, and as part of that I wanted to change the domain name, normally a very straight forward process, but again due to the theme Sam and her team recommended to me, it has not been straightforward and changing the domain changed so much on my website, including the design and layout that I had to instantly change it back to the old name. I now need to find another web developer/designer to sort the issues, even more expense, time, energy and stress yet again. I dread to think how much extra money this site has caused me due to Sam’s poor decisions, but it is running into the thousands. I have since been advised by other developers that I have had to get help from (more money), that I have spent well over the odds for an incredibly restrictive theme, when all Sam and her team have done is populate a website theme on my behalf. This should not have cost anywhere near the £5000+ I paid them. I even supplied Sam with the copy and image to lessen their work load and checked all of the content on the site. Because of all of these problems, I paid for someone to check the site for me, for other issues, which there are, including the cookie policy compliance which had left me wide open, as it has not been set up correctly by Sam and her team. Again, something else she told me she had done. I originally agreed for my website to be built as a Divi site, which has lots of flexibility to grow with the business and I am familiar with it. But Sam then suggested I should get it built in Enfold, I don’t know this theme but I trusted her as she assured me it has the same capabilities as Divi. It doesn’t as I later found out and continue to find out every time I try to evolve the business and my website. She never once explained to me that this would limit me in the future, even though she knew my business objectives. This is why I paid her so much money as I thought she knew her stuff as a chartered Marketer but she has advised me very badly. I do not like leaving negative reviews and back when the issues started to arise last year I contacted Sam directly in hope that she would help me fix these issues but she was so unhelpful , rude and dismissive. I decided to leave it at the time, as it had caused me so much stress and I didn’t want anymore, especially with covid going on. However, after yesterday when I tried to change the domain only to find out that won’t be as straightforward as it should be, I want to make sure no one else goes through the same stress and financial loss that I have."

"We have commissioned Sam to deliver workshops for our programme Export for Growth and her work has been well researched, responsive and engaging. I unreservedly recommend her services, be it marketing or training."