Nicholas Green, joint chief executive of Tangent, said that he was excited by the acquisition, which will open up a new sales channel to Snowball's client base, as well as boosting Tangent's data insight and analytics capability.

Green said: "This revolution is going to take place. At some point over time, the industry will shift and people will be generating millions of pages that are all unique by way of content and you've got to have the right people doing this.

"So when we find a company like Snowball that has been providing insight services to some very important brands for the last five years and then you find out that they're also generating quite a lot of digital print, I just think that's brilliant."

Damian Bentley, managing director of Snowball, added: "This partnership with Tangent provides some excellent opportunities for the further development of the Snowball proposition and brings new benefits for our clients."

The initial £1m payment will be followed by a further £2.2m consideration, comprising £1.7m payable in cash and £500,000 in shares, which is subject to the acquired businesses meeting EBIT targets rising to a total of £1.5m over a three-year period to 31 August 2012.

Green said that Tangent would still retain £750,000 of net cash following the initial payment and that it was "seeing more strategic opportunities arise", which it would continue to consider.

Snowball, which provides data insight and analytic services to a range of customers, including Dunhill and Bang & Olufsen, posted a pre-tax profit of £878,000 in 2008 on revenues of £2.27m.