If you've been Googling "GoHighLevel agency North East" or "Make.com agency UK" and getting nothing back — that's not a glitch. There genuinely aren't many agencies up here offering these services. In fact, when it comes to marketing automation in Sunderland and the wider North East, Northern Digital is the only agency that builds, configures, and manages these platforms for businesses.
That's not a boast. It's just a gap in the market that nobody else has bothered to fill.
What Is GoHighLevel (and Why Should You Care)?
GoHighLevel is an all-in-one CRM and marketing platform. Think of it as having your email marketing, SMS campaigns, sales funnels, appointment booking, reputation management, and pipeline tracking all under one roof. Instead of paying for Mailchimp, Calendly, a separate CRM, a funnel builder, and a review management tool — you get everything in one place.
For small and medium businesses, that's a proper game-changer. You stop juggling six different logins, six different monthly bills, and six different systems that don't talk to each other. GoHighLevel pulls it all together.
The catch? It's powerful, but it's not exactly plug-and-play. Setting it up properly — building the automations, configuring the pipelines, writing the sequences — takes time and expertise. That's where having an agency that actually knows the platform makes all the difference.
What Is Make.com (and How Does It Fit In)?
Make.com (formerly Integromat) is a workflow automation platform. If GoHighLevel is your marketing command centre, Make.com is the wiring behind the walls that connects everything else together.
Say a lead fills in a form on your website. Make.com can automatically add them to your CRM, send them a welcome email, notify your sales team on Slack, create a task in your project management tool, and log the whole thing in a spreadsheet — all without anyone lifting a finger.
It connects over 1,500 apps together. The possibilities are genuinely endless, and the time savings are massive. Businesses using workflow automation typically save anywhere from 10 to 20 hours per week on repetitive admin tasks. That's not a made-up number — that's what the industry data consistently shows.
Why Most North East Agencies Don't Offer This
Here's the honest truth: most digital agencies in the North East are still operating on a fairly traditional model. They'll build you a website, maybe run some Google Ads or manage your social media. And there's nothing wrong with that — those things matter.
But when it comes to the automation layer — the bit that actually makes your marketing work harder while you work less — most agencies either don't understand it, don't offer it, or actively avoid it.
Some of the bigger agencies in the region have dipped a toe into AI, but only at enterprise level — the kind of thing that's out of reach for most local businesses. Others have taken a stance against AI and automation altogether, which is a bold strategy for 2026.
At Northern, we took a different path. We've built our entire service model around these tools because we genuinely believe they're the future of how small and medium businesses will compete. You shouldn't need a six-figure budget to have your marketing running on autopilot.
What Northern Actually Does With These Tools
We're not just reselling software licences and leaving you to figure it out. Here's what working with us looks like in practice:
GoHighLevel CRM Setup and Management
We configure the entire platform around your business — custom pipelines, automated follow-up sequences, appointment booking, review request campaigns, and reporting dashboards. Everything is tailored to how you actually work, not some generic template.
Make.com Workflow Automation
We build the automations that connect your tools together. New lead comes in? It gets routed, tagged, and followed up automatically. Invoice goes unpaid? A reminder sequence kicks in. Blog post gets published? It's reformatted and distributed across your channels. The whole point is to remove the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that actually needs a human brain.
The Northern AI Suite
We've packaged our most popular automation tools into what we call the Northern AI Suite — a combination of GoHighLevel, Make.com, and custom AI workflows that handle everything from lead generation to content repurposing to client communication. It's the full stack, built specifically for businesses in the North East who want to punch above their weight.
Marketing Automation in Sunderland: The Local Advantage
There's something to be said for working with an agency that's actually based where you are. We're in Sunderland. We know the local business space. We understand the challenges that North East businesses face — tighter budgets, smaller teams, the constant pressure to do more with less.
That's exactly why automation makes so much sense up here. When you haven't got a marketing department of twenty people, you need your systems doing the heavy lifting. A well-configured GoHighLevel setup with the right Make.com automations behind it can genuinely give a five-person company the marketing output of a team three times its size.
Is This Right for Your Business?
If any of this sounds familiar, automation is probably worth a conversation:
- You're spending hours every week on repetitive admin and follow-ups
- Your leads come in but nobody follows up fast enough
- You're paying for five or six different marketing tools that don't work together
- You know you should be doing more with your marketing but there aren't enough hours in the day
- You've heard about GoHighLevel or Make.com but have no idea where to start
We're not going to hard-sell you. That's not how we work. But if you want to see what marketing automation could look like for your specific business, we're happy to have a chat and show you the possibilities.
Get in Touch
Northern Digital is the North East's only dedicated GoHighLevel agency and Make.com automation partner. If you're a business in Sunderland, Newcastle, Durham, or anywhere in the region and you want your marketing to actually work for you — let's have a conversation.
No jargon. No six-month lock-in contracts. Just smart automation that saves you time and makes you money.
