State of the Agency
Happy New Year!
We’ve had some big things going on here at DOM, causing some pretty large growth. One of the things that fell through the cracks – as longtime readers will already know – is posting with any kind of regularity. We’ve gotten much more frequent on major social media accounts like facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter – even on Google+, which I refuse to count as major – but we might as well have put up a giant sad face on our digital marketing blog‘s front page.
Being the start of the new year, I’ll share two of my resolutions publicly:
- Blog more. We’re going to spread out the responsibility to other members of the team. We’ll be sharing much more frequent, often shorter posts, to get industry changes and what they mean for you on a regular basis.
- Exercise. I actually started before the new year, the kick in the pants being my annual physical (I still have all my college football eligibility!). Had what I thought was a nice conversation with my doc, told him my back was bothering me a bit, and he sent me on my merry way. After I left, I took a look at my paperwork and got this nice little note:
2013 Agency Highlights
So with the obligatory resolutions out of the way, here are some highlights from 2013, most of which never made it onto Found. Think of the following like that Christmas card from your third cousin updating you on his family’s beach trip and daughter being named a National Merit Scholar.
- Hanapin Marketing named me the 11th Most Influential PPC Expert in 2013. Thanks, folks! That’s up from #25 in 2012 and both years were a complete surprise.
- We’ve beefed up our Latin American reach. While we’ve serviced clients from around the globe for many years, I was invited to speak at a couple conferences this summer/fall:
- U.S. Commercial Service Trade Mission to Central America. I spoke in San Jose, Costa Rica.
- The JoinClusters conference as part of Semana Tic in Córdoba, Argentina. If you skip ahead to the 2:30:00 mark, you can hear my full presentation (in English):
- The U.S. Commercial Service brought us in to train local businesses on how to improve their export marketing efforts at several events including in Greensboro, NC; Baltimore, and Pittsburgh.
- We were named a Top Pay Per Click Management agency by TopSEOs in October.
- We grew pretty substantially; check back soon for a ‘meet the team’ section where you can, umm, meet the team and get to know the folks that work on your accounts a little better.
- Google reached out to us about hosting an event to educate the local business community on changes to the evolving digital landscape. Interest was so large we had to break it up into two events. Click here to view pics from the Get Found event.
- We offered a variety of new tactics to our clients, including more advanced twitter advertising opportunities, facebook retargeting, new Google Shopping (Product Listing Ads), and more.
- Besides the U.S. Commercial Service events, we held in person training events throughout the region in conjunction with universities (WVU and Marshall); colleges (CCBC); chambers (Washington County Chamber of Commerce); and associations (car dealer groups, CVB memberships, and community associations).
- The Governor of West Virginia honored us with additional International Market Entry Awards this summer in Charleston.
- I was invited back to speak at the NADA Convention & Expo in February, the world’s largest car and truck dealer convention.
Many thanks to all the people responsible for our success in 2013. Look for even better things and many more Found blog posts in 2014. Now, here’s a video of a monkey crawling all over me in Costa Rica:
