What We Do

Contact Media is a Strategic Marketing Firm

It sounds fancy but it’s really pretty simple: We create profitable marketing strategies for small businesses. You already know that you need to market your business, we help you do it right. We believe that advertising should be tracked and optimized continuously. We also believe that ROI should guide every marketing decision. Our goal is to turn every dollar you allocate to marketing into an investment that generates a measurable return.

Yes, we make stuff and do all the things you might expect from a traditional advertising agency like copywriting, media planning and placement, graphic design, web development, and search marketing; but the difference is that we understand that these things are merely tools that are only as effective as the strategy they support.

Companies hire us because they know that something is missing.

They are spending money on advertising and not getting the results they expect. Oftentimes they can’t even truly tell what’s working and what’s not. Here are the three most common scenarios:

• The owner of the business is handling the marketing but doesn’t have the experience to do it right or the time to learn how. This is a classic trap with entrepreneurs. They tend to think about advertising as a matter of finding the right combination of media and buying as much they can at the lowest rates possible. They spend lots of time coming up with ideas for offers and sales promotions but constantly feel like they are starting from scratch at the beginning of each month.

• The business has an in-house marketing department but that department is struggling to demonstrate the return on investment associated with their initiatives. They have lots of great ideas and are getting things done, but they have a hard time proving that all that hard work is creating new revenue. In almost all of these cases, there is also a profound disconnect between what the marketing department is doing and what the sales department is doing – which is a real problem. We can fix that.

• The business is working with a traditional advertising agency that is full of big ideas but short on business acumen. You pay big bucks to sit through long meetings and dramatic presentations chock full of buzzwords and gibberish. Yes, they sound impressive. Yes, the work looks fantastic. I’ll bet they’ve even got a trophy case full of ADDY awards. But is the work they are doing producing a profit? How can you tell?

Of course, we’re not right for everybody, or every business.

For one thing, you’ll notice that we don’t use a lot of fluffy marketing-speak. You’re not going to catch us babbling on about “branding,” “engagement,” or “touchpoints.”

And we don’t mention Twitter, Facebook, and blogging every time we open our mouths just to prove that we are conscious of their existence.

We also don’t come up with kooky names for our “process.” We identify marketing problems and solve them. No need to break that concept up into 8 steps and call it something cheesy like “Brandscaping” or “Contact Branding.”

Instead of the fluffy stuff, we like to talk about things that matter like sales, traffic, leads generated, appointments booked, consultations scheduled, conversion rates, cost per lead, cost per sale, inbound phone calls, average profit per sale, etc. These are the types of things we like to track and manipulate and we’re not afraid to talk about it because we are confident in our ability to do so.

The methods we use are not dependent on any particular media, product, or secret formula. They are also not dependent on spending more money. In fact, most of our methods take advantage of free or low cost tools that can dramatically lower costs compared to more traditional strategies.

We use the same tools everyone else does but are more strategic and disciplined about what we say, how we say it, and the actions we expect to occur. It’s not rocket science but it does involve fairly complex systems, hard work, and a broad knowledge of a variety of different marketing disciplines.

There are very few business models that cannot be dramatically transformed using our methods. They are equally relevant in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer scenarios. If you follow the plan we can get you where you want to go, but you have to be open to non-traditional ideas and willing to put some time and effort in to the process.