So, what exactly is Coastal Media?
Good question.
Our backgrounds are in marketing, media, communications and strategy. But Coastal Media has been shaped just as much by what we've learned from working with hundreds of small businesses across Norfolk.
We've seen what helps. What doesn't. Where people get stuck. And what can happen when someone gets the chance to step away from the day-to-day and look at their business properly.
That's why Coastal Media has grown into what it is today: a place for small business owners to connect, learn, find clarity and get practical support as their business develops.
We're Matt and Gabs. And this is the story behind it.
Gabriella Walker
Gabs has spent her career in marketing, advertising and business transformation, working with organisations large and small.
She's particularly good at taking a business owner with seventeen things going around their head and helping them work out which ones actually matter.
At Coastal Media, Gabs leads much of our one-to-one work and training. Expect plenty of questions, Post-it notes, practical ideas and the occasional suggestion that the thing you thought you needed might not actually be the thing you need.
She also has a knack for spotting what's already good about a business when the person running it has become too close to see it.
Matthew Walker
Matt's background spans marketing, communications, government and the media industry. He's worked on everything from public policy and national campaigns to industry strategy, and has spent an unreasonable amount of his life thinking about how people find, understand and respond to information.
At Coastal Media, that translates into lots of questions. Who are we actually trying to reach? Why would they care? What evidence do we have? Is that really the problem? Do you genuinely need to be on TikTok?
He's particularly interested in the bigger picture: how marketing connects with the customer journey, the wider business and what you're actually trying to achieve.
...and then we moved to Norfolk.
Moving to Norfolk changed quite a lot for us. Including, eventually, the kind of work we wanted to do.
As Coastal Media developed, we started meeting and working with the people behind businesses right across the county. Shops and cafés. Makers and creatives. Pubs and hospitality businesses. Trades and professional services. Businesses employing dozens of people and businesses where the entire team is one person, a laptop and occasionally a dog.
And the more businesses we worked with, the more we learned.
Running a small business involves some big decisions. Who are the right customers? What should you charge? Where should you spend your time and money? Should you grow? What does growth even mean? And how do you make all of that work alongside everything else going on in your life?
We realised that the experience we'd built up over our careers could be genuinely useful here. Not by taking big-business answers and shrinking them down, but by helping small business owners work out what makes sense for their business.
That idea has shaped Coastal Media ever since.
Training led to conversations. Conversations led to meet-ups, Clarity Days, Focus Sessions, Go Digital and a growing community of people who have taught us just as much about running a small business as we've ever taught them about marketing.
A few years and hundreds of businesses later, Norfolk isn't simply where Coastal Media is based.
It's the reason Coastal Media has become what it is today.
Nice things people have said about us
“I feel I have genuine support from people who actually care and are not just making the right noises and then forgetting about me once I'm out of sight!”
Deborah Phillips, Deborah Phillips Studio, Stalham
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