Marketing Agency in Dorset
The Artist Studio is a full service marketing agency based in Sherborne, Dorset. We handle web design, branding, SEO, paid advertising and content for small and medium businesses across Dorset and Somerset. Boutique team, transparent pricing, and the people who pitch the work are the people who do it.
Most Dorset marketing agencies are in Bournemouth or Poole. That’s where the population is, so it makes sense, but it means a business in Sherborne, Bruton, Gillingham, Dorchester or Blandford is often choosing between a supplier fifty miles away and whoever happens to be nearby.
We’re in the middle of that gap, on South Street in Sherborne. Close enough to north and west Dorset to turn up when turning up matters, and set up to work remotely with anyone who doesn’t need us in the room.
The businesses we work with tend to be independent, premium, and selling something people actually pick up and look at. Candles, cider, jewellery, homeware, heritage building materials. Brands where how the thing looks is part of what it’s worth.
What we do
Website design and build
We design and build sites on Webflow and Shopify. Fast, responsive, structured properly for search, and handed over so you can run them yourself if you want to.
Most Dorset businesses come to us with one of three problems: a site that looks dated, a site that looks fine but doesn’t convert, or a site nobody can update without ringing someone. All three are fixable. The second one is the expensive one to ignore.
Brand and identity
Logos, visual systems, packaging, illustration. A brand is what lets you charge more than the person selling the same thing, which matters more in a county full of small independent producers competing on quality rather than price.
We work on full identities and on tidying up existing ones, which is more common than people expect.
SEO and user experience
Technical SEO, site structure, local search, conversion work. We do this for clients and we do it on our own site, which is a fair test of whether an agency believes its own pitch.
For a Dorset business the local layer matters most: Google Business Profile, reviews, consistent business information across directories, and pages built for the towns you actually serve. Increasingly it also means being findable inside AI answers, which follows different rules to blue links.
Paid advertising
Google Ads and Meta. Campaign structure, creative, targeting, and continuous optimisation.
Paid works best when the site behind it converts, so we’ll tell you if the money is better spent on the landing page first. That conversation costs us short term revenue and saves you more.
Social and content
Strategy, scheduling, campaigns, and the thing most agencies outsource: photography and video.
We shoot in house. Product, food, lifestyle, video. That matters more than it did a few years ago, because AI has made polished imagery cheap and easy, which means polish no longer signals quality on its own. Real photographs of real products, made properly, now do work that stock and synthetic imagery can’t.
Where we work in Dorset and Somerset
We’re based in Sherborne and work across the region.
Dorset: Sherborne, Sturminster Newton, Blandford Forum, Gillingham, Shaftesbury, Dorchester, Beaminster, Bridport, Wimborne, Poole, Bournemouth, Weymouth.
Somerset: Yeovil, Wincanton, Bruton, Castle Cary, Templecombe, Somerton, Ilminster.
Nearby work happens in person. Everything else runs remotely, and most clients prefer that anyway once a project is underway.
Who we work with
Ambitious small and medium businesses, mostly independent, mostly across Dorset and Somerset, some further afield.
Recent and current clients include Rose of Jericho, The Compton Candle Company, Shirley’s Cider, The Country Crib, Silver & Bead, Sherborne Castle Country Fair, Printasleeve, Hayden Hill London and Global Connect.
“Chris and the team at The Artist Studio are fantastic to work with. What truly sets them apart is their communication: clear, prompt, and always aligned with your goals.”
Stephen Comer, The Country Crib
What does it cost?
We publish pricing because being cagey about it wastes everyone’s time.
Website projects for a Dorset small business typically run £2,000 to £8,000 depending on scope, with e-commerce builds starting higher. Brand identity projects and ongoing retainers are quoted against the work, and most SME retainers in the UK sit between £1,500 and £3,500 a month.
Two things we won’t do. We won’t quote a retainer that’s too small to do anything useful with, and we won’t bill by the hour, because hourly billing means you pay more when we work slower.
Read our blog: How much does a website cost in Dorset?
How we work
Small team, no account handlers. The people you meet at the start are the people doing the work, which is the main practical difference between a boutique studio and a larger agency.
Projects usually run four to eight weeks depending on scope. You get direct contact throughout, not a ticketing system.
You own everything. Your website files, your ad accounts, your analytics, your creative. It’s all in your name with us granted access, not the other way round. If you ever leave, you leave with everything.
