The big difference is the branding

We are a branding agency as well as a marketing agency. The key to getting a 10X ROAS begins with branding. Focusing on your Value Proposition: What makes you different and better than your competitors. If you do this well, marketing is just a matter of getting your brand in front of as many qualified people as possible. The good news is that never before in the history of the world has there been more ways to get you brand in front of people. Examples: Paid Ads, Social Media, Search Engines, OTT (streaming channels), Blogs plus all the traditional ways like TV, Radio, Billboards, Direct Mail, flyers and probably a million other ways that get lost in the shuffle.

Then We Drive Traffic with Paid Ads. There is no ROAS w/o Ads.

Paid advertising is important because it allows brands to reach highly targeted audiences quickly and consistently, ensuring their message is seen by the right people at the right time. It also provides measurable results, helping businesses optimize campaigns for maximum return on investment and brand growth.

Then don’t forget this: Remarketing is your secret weapon (if done right). We do remarketing differently than most agencies. We like to use remarketing as an awareness tool. This is the way Big Brands do advertising and Google levels the playing field. The reason people always order Coke when they go to McDonald’s is because Coca Cola has ads everywhere. Billboards, Super Bowl Commercials, you name it. Chances are you’ve already seen a few Coca Cola ads today. There are a lot of great beverages at McDonald’s. Fanta, Mug Rootbeer, Country Time Lemonade but when people go in to order, when asked what they want with their burger, they always say Coke.

The reason this is so powerful is twofold. When customers are looking at your competitors and exploring options they see your ads so that when it’s time to buy, they choose you. Also, ads are delivered only to people who have visited your website, so they know who you are. So when they see your ads, you appear big and it looks like you are everywhere which builds trust.

Next We Optimize Your Website

The biggest mistake we see people make, even big agencies, is that they run ads but don’t optimize the website. For most businesses, even brick-and-mortar businesses, the website is the first point of contact for a brand. Getting people to visit a website with paid ads is “relatively” easy, getting people to buy stuff is the hardest part of marketing. The most common reasons for this are a poorly designed landing page, pricing, or people just don’t want what you are selling. We can’t do much about the last one, but for the other two you need a website that is optimized for conversion (buying stuff).

The key to this is what we call “Logic Mapping”. Logic Mapping is making sure your “Different and Better” is on every page of your website, then on every piece of communication that your brand puts out in the world. It starts with your organization’s Name, Slogan or Tagline, Website (of course) then Emails, Social Media, Business Collateral, Packaging, Articles, Interviews, Blog Posts, etc. Literally everything you do needs to scream your “Different and Better”.

After That We Look At The Data And Adjust

The real power of the path to 10X comes from “thinking small.” Just about any ad agency will tell you that it takes at least six months to see results from a marketing initiative (10X can take 2 years). Often less clear is why it takes this long. This is because marketing is far from just running ads. Running ads is perhaps the easiest and fastest way to get people to visit your website. But getting people to your website is not the hard part. Getting people to buy stuff is the real challenge. This is where the data comes in.

Most of the time this data is something like how many visits were generated with the campaign, how long they stayed on the page, the bounce rate (how many pages they looked at) and, most importantly for e-commerce, what they purchased. For a nonprofit, this may be donations or memberships, and for a tech startup, it might be how many people demoed the app.

Just as important as what pages they looked at is to know what specific parts of each page they looked at, too. We need to know which paragraphs interest them the most, what pictures they enjoy, what buttons they click on (if any), and which sections they spend most of their time reading. We use heatmap software for this that displays the points your visitors are interested in as hot colors, like yellow and red, and the parts they don’t like as cool colors, like blue and purple, which allows us to learn about what is working and what isn’t so we can make adjustments.

We repeat the process over and over again, learning a bit more each time, revising our strategy accordingly, then reapplying what we have learned to the digital ads, email campaigns, website and brand messaging—literally every point of contact an organization has with customers, clients or members until it is so well refined that it can run on its own.

Once everything is dialed in, we Do “Smart” Email Marketing

Email marketing is important because it reinforces ad campaigns by keeping your brand top of mind and nurturing leads after initial engagement. It also allows for personalized follow-ups that drive higher conversions and builds stronger customer relationships over time. That’s why it’s important to do it the right way.

Create drip campaigns, a series of automated emails that are created specifically for the people in your email list. Information is king. If you consistently provide useful and valuable information, you can email as often as you like and – contrary to what you find on the internet – in the email game more is better. They just need to provide value – and of course deliver your value proposition.

The key to everything once you can articulate what it is that you do differently and better than your competitors is to get it in front of as many people as possible. And email is another very good way to do that.

The rest is easy. Write emails that contain valuable information, tips, or special discounts on the products they love (this is why identifying the interests of people and knowing what products they buy is so important). And most importantly: DO NOT SELL!

We Optimize Your Product Offerings and Pricing

organizations must continuously refine how they present value to customers. Two of the most powerful levers available are product assortment and pricing. Optimizing both is not a one-time effort but an ongoing strategic discipline. When executed well, it drives higher profitability, deeper customer loyalty, and long-term resilience.

Product offering optimization means carefully shaping your assortment so that every product earns its place. Too many businesses fall into the trap of expanding their catalog endlessly, believing more choices automatically translate to more sales. In reality, as Michael Newman, cofounder of the Bureau of Small Projects likes to say: The confused mind says no.

Bloated assortments confuse buyers, dilute marketing resources, and increase operational complexity. Customers gravitate toward businesses with clear expertise. If your offerings are intentionally curated, buyers perceive your brand as knowledgeable and trustworthy which builds confidence, reduces returns, and strengthens long-term relationships.

While your product assortment determines what you sell, optimizing the pricing determines how effectively you capture value. Pricing is one of the most misunderstood but financially impactful areas of optimization. Even small improvements can dramatically lift margins, while poorly set prices can undermine even the strongest product strategy.

A 1% to 2% improvement in price can translate into a significant increase in net profit, often more than entire cost cutting initiatives.

We get you listed on websites that rank your kind of organization

It’s cheaper, easier (and more credible) to leverage existing SEO than to create your own. On top of that, being listed on websites that rank the best in an organization’s field builds credibility and trust with potential customers. We all know that it is far more impactful when someone else says how great you are than if you tell people how awesome you are yourself.

Platforms like Yelp, Angi, Clutch, DesignRush, Expertise.com and ThomasNet and have strong SEO and AI footprints. Their category pages frequently appear on the first page of Google for high-intent searches such as “Top Comedy Clubs in Chicago”, “Best Eco-Friendly Clothing Brands” and “Top Architecture Firms”. If your business isn’t listed where customers are already looking, you immediately lose ground to competitors who are.

More importantly, ranking platforms typically attract visitors with strong purchase intent. A user searching for “best comedy club near me” or “top architectural firms” is not casually browsing; they are ready to take action. Listings on these platforms can deliver direct inbound inquiries, referral traffic to your website, phone calls or form submissions. Many companies find that leads from ranking directories convert at a higher rate than leads from broad advertising channels.

We Use Organic Social Media The Right Way

Most people do social media wrong. Or at least wrong for business. The first mistake is to think of Social Media as cheap advertising. We get a lot of people who want us to manage their Social Media and then get disappointed because nobody is coming to their channel or worse: sales are not improving.

This is not how social media works. Just like in the real world, sitting at home and talking to yourself will not win you friends. You need first to have something interesting to say and then you need to get out in the world to find people who want to listen. Neither is cheap. if it is cheap in money, then you need to spend a lot of time creating content.. either doing it yourself and your time is money or paying real money to have someone do it for you.

Like paid ads, you can pay to boost your special posts. When you speak to your own friends, your social channels won’t grow, or won’t grow very fast. By boosting your posts, you reach targeted people out side of your friend group. And if they like what you have to say they will stick around for more. This can be very powerful if done well.

We Help With PR, Thought Leadership And Social Proof

PR and Thought Leadership is not simply about who shouts the loudest. It is about shaping conversations, influencing how others think, and providing original insights that create value. In business, academia, technology and social causes, thought leaders gain influence.

Thought leaders builds trust. In environments where people must choose whom to listen to, buy from, or collaborate with, trust becomes the decisive factor. Thought leaders demonstrate expertise not through self-promotion, but through the quality and usefulness of their ideas. By explaining complex issues clearly, anticipating trends, or offering practical frameworks, they signal competence and reliability. Over time, audiences come to rely on these voices, making trust a durable asset that competitors find difficult to replicate.

What distinguishes one professional or organization from another is the “different and better”. A thought leader reframes problems, challenges assumptions, or introduces new ways of thinking that resonate with real-world needs. This intellectual differentiation positions them as a reference point in their domain. When decisions arise, such as which brand to trust or which expert to quote, thought leaders are more likely to be top of mind.

We Help You Build A Great Sales Team

A great sales team is essential because even the best advertising and marketing can’t close deals without skilled human interaction. They build trust, address objections, and personalize solutions in ways that automated campaigns cannot. Strong salespeople turn leads into loyal customers, directly impacting revenue and long-term business growth.

The irony of this is if we were going to impart one piece of wisdom about creating an awesome sales team it would be this:

Do not sell.

Change “sales” calls to “client evaluation” calls and tell everyone in the entire organization to never use the word sales. It seems obvious now but nobody likes salespeople and nobody likes to be sold.

Make these initial meetings working meetings where the goal is to determine what a prospect needs from your organization, the budget for that and most importantly if you like each other enough to spend the next few months working closely together.

What should I look for in an agency?

If you are considering working with an agency, ask if they do advertising for themselves. Oddly enough most don’t, and if they don’t, ask why. If they are good at marketing you would think they would do advertising for themselves too. Advertising is like printing money if you do it well. Ask Apple. They spend 15% of their revenue on advertising and coincidentally are one of the most valuable brands on the planet.

ROAS is the simplest and most clear measure of performance. No agency can show you their client’s books, there isn’t a client in the world who will let you do that, but they can show you their own books. We practice what we preach and we do advertising for ourselves, this is how we learn. We try everything out on ourselves before we roll it out to our clients. Here is our performance for the past year:

Why is it important that an agency does advertising for themselves?

If an agency believes in what they are doing for you, they should believe in it for themselves, right? Advertising for themselves lets an agency experiment with new ideas and try out new ad channels before rolling them to their clients. Be wary of an agency that uses you as a guinea pig.

How long did it take?

“It takes 10 years to become an overnight success” –Jeff Bezos. It only took us 2. The typical timeframe agencies will say it takes to see any results from marketing is 6 months. To get to 10x it took us 2 years. Was it worth it? Absolutely. With 10x ROAS an organization can weather just about any storm.

Why did it take so long?

Our agency was funded by the money we earned, not private equity or investors so we had to do a little bit at a time. And since every penny came out of our own pocket, like many of our clients, every penny was precious to us. Spending money can get you there faster, but because it took so much time we learned the process very well.

Is it luck?

We’ve been doing this for years. But just to be sure that our 10+ return on ad spend was not luck, we did an experiment in 2025 to see if it might be because of the economy or some other outside factor. It turns out we massively out performed the economy and here is the data:

What makes our way of marketing different and better than our competitors?

We don’t do marketing and we don’t have sales people. That is the key to 10X. We are a branding agency, and when you approach marketing as branding, then it’s just a matter of getting your brand in front of as many people as possible. Fortunately because of the internet, social media and more recently AI, never in the history of the world has there been more ways to get your brand in front of people. It all centers around what makes your organization different and better than your competitors. Then we keep everything in plain english – we don’t use clever ad campaigns, lavish photoshoots or expensive video – because clever is the enemy of smart.

Can we guarantee 10x for you?

Absolutely not.  Factors like ability to close leads, whether people want /need your products or services and a host of other things play a part in the return on ad spend. But we get more than 10x for ourselves so there is no reason we can’t do better for you too. We are not particularly special and we are operating in an extremely saturated market (you can’t throw a nickel without hitting another branding or digital marketing agency). If we do the same thing for your organization that we do for ourselves, it stands to reason that you should see very good return on your ad spend and certainly better than if you worked with an agency that cannot get 10X for themselves.